Transcript for: Buying an expensive first home
Interviewee: Asghar Ali
Subject: Buying a house in Huddersfield
My father bought a house and suggested that I go and live there, but I didn't like the area. He bought me a house in Thornton Lodge, on Thornton Lodge Road, and I thought it was too cramped, I wanted to live on the outskirts, where there was plenty of trees and greenery and light, in the countryside. So I didn't like the idea, so I didn't want to go and live there. I was looking around and I found a new estate that was being built on Norwood Road, and it had a green belt on one side, which was quite nice, because it was a wooded area. The houses were just being built and I decided to buy a house; my wife and I both came down and had a look and liked it, and we put a deposit down on it of £100, we thought we will buy this house. The house was going to cost us £14, 000- in those days, that was 1979, you could buy a three bedroom house for less than a thousand pounds- and that was quite expensive for me, but it was within my limit. After putting down £700 as deposit, with the rest as mortgage, I was able to buy the house. We did ask ourselves: could we afford it, could we not? but we decided to take the risk, because in those days inflation was quite high. The interest rate of the mortgage was at 15%, so we decided to take the chance and buy the house. As time went on, with inflation everything got dearer, so in reality our house got cheaper, so we bought it because the interest rate had started going up, so the mortgage wasn't that difficult.