Buying your first home for so many people feels basically impossible. Rising house costs and average wages not quite keeping up have made it incredibly difficult, and many are being forced to wait for years, we’re speaking to Brian Brynes, a personal finance expert on the best ways to finally be able to afford it.
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00:00Look, the cost of living crisis still rumbles on. Even though prices aren't increasing quite
00:08as much as they were a couple of years ago, we know that they haven't come down and are
00:12very likely, unlikely to come down to what they were kind of five years ago. So we know
00:18the pressure that is out there on people's savings and on people's wallets. I think the
00:23key point is not to get disillusioned. So if you do just look at the news and the headlines,
00:28it can seem like there's kind of very limited good news out there if you are trying to save
00:33or you're trying to invest or hit your financial goals.
00:38Brian says there is help out there for people and one that can be a really useful tool is
00:42the Lifetime ISA, a bank account that the UK government will top up depending on how
00:46much you have saved in it.
00:48So the Lifetime ISA is a government incentivised saving and investing product. You can save
00:52up to £4,000 per tax year and the government will top that up by 25%. So you can get a
00:57free £1,000 on top of your savings from the government every tax year and you can
01:02use that money either to purchase your first home or to supplement your retirement savings.
01:08The Lifetime ISA can be a massive help for people. Brian says that millions of people
01:12have already used them, including Bethan, who said it was one of the last pieces of
01:16the puzzle before she could get her home.
01:18Hi, I found it really difficult to save, so I took out a Lifetime ISA to help to save
01:25towards a new house, sort of slowly and surely. So over quite a few years, and Covid definitely
01:33helped me to save in order to be able to buy my first home, I think the total government
01:41bonus that I ended up having, I was just checking actually, was around, I think, £5,000 altogether,
01:48which is massive, you know, when you're trying to save for a house and like every penny helps,
01:53you know.
01:54There's about 1.5 million people that are saving into Lifetime ISAs today. About three
01:58million people have used them since they were brought in in 2017, but lots more people could
02:03be using them than currently are. So as I say, we're trying to get the word out there
02:07and as I say, spread that you can get a little bit of help from the government in what is,
02:11as I say, a very expensive and tough time to be a first-time buyer.
02:18One thing that Brian says is incredibly important to remember for everyone struggling to get
02:22that deposit together, that you're certainly not alone in that. There are thousands if
02:26not millions of people in exactly the same boat and talking to others can really help
02:30you through that.
02:32First-time buyers are facing some of the harshest buying conditions in two or three decades.
02:37We all know what's happened with house prices over recent years. Interest rates are higher
02:42than they've been in 10 or 15 years, so mortgages are very expensive. So anything that can help
02:47first-time buyers, they should take as much advantage of as possible. And there's very
02:51few places as well that you get free money from the government. So this is something
02:55specifically designed to help first-time buyers.