First time buyers: some tips to help you raise a deposit

How does the maths work for........

"Cutting out a daily Starbucks at £1.50 and a sandwich at £3.50 and taking a

packed lunch saves another £5 a day"

Does a packed lunch cost nothing?

Emotive waffle like this just turns my stomach: "It just depends how much you want to buy your own home."

It's not exactly Fair and Balanced is it?

What about student debts? They surely need to be cleared first.

And what about people who are unable to live with their parents either due to the location of their work or because their parents won't/can't let them stay?

The only good thing about this article is that it encourages first time buyers to save for two years.

In those two years we can only hope that house prices will have corrected to a hell of a lot closer to their long-term average than they did in the first incremental step down.

Borrow the deposit on a credit card at 0% for 18 months. Hopefully you'll buy a wreck that needs work, after doing the work the property will be worth more, after a year apply for a remortgage. Release the equity and pay back the credit card.

Good point Bill Bobbins. I guess the author lives in that world where grown adults with average incomes get to live in their parents' house, eat their parents' food and burn their parents' electricity without making any contribution to the expenses.

Hopefully her next bit of useful advice will be on how parents can pay their own rent or mortgage on the 3 bed house they wouldn't need if they weren't still providing free food and lodging for their grown up offspring.

I am astounded by this simpleminded article!!! How many parents can afford to keep their fully grown offspring? Food, fuel are free of course for parents, many of whom will be pensioners!!!

I'm going through this process at the moment. It's so hard for me to do on my own, I've saved 25,000 but every time I find somewhere, someone who wants to buy an investment property has already snapped it up because they've done deals with the Estate agents to get first refusal. Demoralising!!! The investment property is ruining the market for the first time buyer.

Instead, I end up renting a property from these people to pay their mortgage on a house they've denied people like me from buying...

£25,000 is very good, anonymous 3. give it time, the market is slowing. We are living in strange times, it isnt always like this.

I dont quite get the writers arithmetic. If someone takes home over £1400 a month and does not pay rent, why do they save only £200 or £400 a month? Why not aim to save £1000, and do it in a year?

Good luck with the house hunting anonymous 3. I managed to buy a flat on my own after a lot of saving, so stick with it, I'm proof that it can happen in the end. Hopefully you'll find a seller who dislikes property investors.

One thing I would discourage is borrowing a deposit on a credit card. That's just storing up a problem for later on. What if your home doesn't increase in value and you are left with a huge credit card bill every month on top of a mortgage. Buying what we couldn't afford helped fuel the recent crisis and I for one do not want to go back there.

Lorna Brookes has to write about something each week, but I am sure she could do better than this article.

Most of it is cloud cuckoo land !

Well, I've got a student loan that I'm slowly paying back (out of my salary automatically), have accured cash savings of about £20,000 (a little more than that as opposed to a bit less) and a further £30,000 or so in investments. These latter funds are intend for my pension which we're also all told we need to get a move on with starting whilst we're young.

Still living at home and providing (an admittadly) minimal contribution to fuel costs (I buy my own food and do my own washing etc). I'm beyond keen to move out I just need a place I can afford and be comfortable in (by comfortable I mean that there are numerous dodgy properties on the market, typcially new builds).

My main fear is negative equity and as a result being stuck in one place or/and going from a sensible savings balance to nothing at all. It's seems like one big gamble - swiming in a sea of sharks.

You do this and you will be caught in the Negative Equity trap that has brought the country to the state it is in today.....

If you are a student you cannot save, if you live with parents you are paying off student debts, if you privately rent you are paying the mortgage of your landlord.

If only Estate agents valued the prioperties correctly and stopped doiung the glattery valuations then property would be affordable again.