Housing Woes

I'm sure this is not a new topic around here, but I got quite a shock today when the reality of our housing situation hit me. My fiance is in the RAF so we are entitled to housing. Being that he's stationed in the Southeast, this is positive. (If we wanted to buy now we could afford a decent home, but I'd rather see what happens with the housing market first and build a little more of a cushion in our savings).

We had a specific area we were interested in that was outside the RAF base and were only interested in seeing houses in that area. I don't know what happened with the application but they offered us a house on the base which we are going to turn down. I found a Facebook group where you can see photos of the housing and the place they offered us is a joke. I expected it to be small, but this is "family-sized" accommodation and you can just barely fit a normal sofa in the living room. (I actually read on the Facebook group about one woman whose home was so small she couldn't even sit in the living room with her husband and son at the same time because there wasn't enough space for furniture to seat all three of them). One of the two bedrooms is a box room. And the "garden" is a couple of slabs of concrete and a very small strip of grass. If I was in London I would be jumping for joy to have any garden at all, but this is rural Hampshire on a military base. (I had a bigger garden when I lived in Zone 2!!) It's not even near a village so it's not like we are trading space for convenience/location. And the condition of it was terrible. But even more than the size, what upsets me is that this is what they provide their service members who sacrifice so much for their country. I work on a US military installation now and it is like night and day. Every time my fiance visits he points out that he has only ever been thanked for his service in the USA. He flew from CA to London a few weeks ago and the USO Lounge at the Charlotte airport gave him food, a place to sleep, etc. He said he would never get that in the UK.

We are given one more opportunity to accept an offer for a house (even though our first refusal will be us turning down a house we were never interested in in the first place) and then we have to find something on our own. It's not the end of the world because we can afford to rent something much nicer than what they've offered us so far. We were just hoping to take advantage of his military benefits and be able to save a little bit of money by paying less rent. Fingers crossed the next one they offer us is better!

I hesitate to give financial advice because I am far from an expert, but I am surprised you can afford a house and don't want to buy one to live in.  I'd think that any house you buy will go up in value far faster than whatever you can save.  My house earns more than I do! 

Plus, mortgage payments are way cheaper than renting, and when renting the money goes to pay someone else's mortgage.  Why wouldn't you want to pay your own mortgage instead? 

I can see that if you can get cheap rent through the military that makes sense. 

I'm also shocked at how poorly soldiers and veterans are treated here.  Sometimes it feels over the top in the US with letting them board planes first and all that, but they really take it to the opposite extreme here.

We could buy, but it really wouldn't be a home we could grow in and since we're starting a family in the next few years we would need that. While we could afford the mortgage payments for a larger home we would need more time to get a bigger deposit. I've been watching the housing market in his area closely and within the last nine months I've noticed a lot more (larger) properties in our price range coming on the market, or being reduced to within our price range, so I'd like to watch the market for a little while and see where it goes.

The state of the military housing was just embarrassing though. There were some places further north that looked absolutely beautiful, but then others that were horrible. I saw photos of people moving into "clean" homes that were stained yellow from cigarette use, or dirty with cupboards filled with food because the previous tenants paid the flat fee to just move out and have the MoD clean it, but they never did. And they just sucked it up and cleaned it themselves rather than asking the housing office to do it!

I know Brits do not like to complain (publicly) but I am not afraid to be the assertive (or obnoxious, depending on who you're asking) American It's probably in their best interest to just give us the nicer house. Otherwise I will be in their office until everything is in working order If I have to pay rent the place better be in a livable state.