Explore every avenue to escape mercy of rising rents - Sarah Coles

Of course, over the years, I came to think of this as the pinnacle of my renting experience. Eventually I was paying more than a third of my salary to my landlord every month, for a flat without functional heating or hot water. Right now, according to Zoopla, the average rent has hit £995 a month, after rising by 11% during the past year, and it’s trapping millions of people in the rental cycle.

According to the English Housing Survey, across the country, one in five homes are rented privately, the average weekly rent is £198 and the average tenant pays 31% of their income in housing costs. In Yorkshire the rental position is slightly less painful than elsewhere. On average in Yorkshire and the Humber, renters spend 26% of their income keeping a roof over their head, with an average rent of £122 a week.

On the flip side, more Yorkshire tenants are having to live with substandard homes. Overall, in the rented sector, 23% of properties fail the Decent Homes Standard, while in Yorkshire and the Humber the figures are even higher at 38% - or 160,000 homes. Damp in particular is more prevalent in rented homes, so in the region, 15% of private rented homes suffer from damp, compared to 3% of owner-occupied ones.

Just over half of renters have been able to start saving towards a deposit, which reflects the findings of the HL Savings and Resilience Barometer, which found renters were less likely to have money left over at the end of the month, and less likely to have savings. What’s even more alarming is that the Barometer forecasts that over the next 12 months, things are going to get even tougher for renters

And it’s not just the cost, renters are also at the mercy of their landlord, and when they chose to raise the rent or sell the property altogether. Three quarters of private renters move by choice, but 6% are asked to leave – and of those 63% say it’s because the landlord wants to sell.

This is hard enough at any age, but we’re renting later in life, which makes the upheaval even more difficult to live with. Although 21% of private renters are aged 35-44, 17% are aged 45-54, and 9% are aged 65 and over. What’s more, older renters may well have families to uproot when they’re forced to move. Just under one in five private renters are couples with children and just over one in ten are single parents.

Aging renters are increasingly unlikely to ever expect to buy, which raises problems for retirement. While most owner/occupiers expect to have paid off the mortgage by then, rent continues for life. It means that renters will need to work out how they’ll afford the extra costs, and put money aside to cover it. Given that so many of them are struggling to pay the rent and build savings, this may well be a step too far.

It begs the question as to what renters can actually do about all of this. It’s incredibly hard to tackle alone, so in many cases they fall back on their family. The Bank of Mum and Dad is still a major lender, helping 7% of first-time buyers onto the property ladder in 2020/21. For those who can afford to help, it’s brilliant to be able to give your offspring a good start in life. If parents aren’t in a position to hand over a lump sum, grandparents may be. If they risk busting the inheritance tax limits it can also help reduce their estate, and protect them from an inheritance tax bill.

Even if nobody in the family can offer up a lump sum, there are other approaches that can help. Some parents are welcoming their boomerang kids back into the home to help them save for their first property. Others consider becoming a guarantor on the mortgage or supporting a specialist family mortgage. These come in different guises but often involve putting savings up to help secure the loan, which they receive back after a fixed number of years if all the repayments have been made.

If prospective buyers can save anything at all in order to get onto the property ladder, then it’s worth making as much of their money as possible. If they’re aged 18-39, and they have at least a year until they want to buy. it’s worth considering paying into a Lifetime ISA. They can contribute up to £4,000 every tax year and in return they get a 25% bonus from the government. There are technicalities to get to grips with, and penalties to pay if they don’t end up using the money to buy a property – or in retirement. However, if a LISA suits their needs, there could be free money with their name on it.

There are no easy answers, or we’d all be taking advantage of them, and everyone would own their own home. However, it’s worth exploring every available avenue, because it may be the only way out of the rental cycle and away from the mercy of rising rents.

We’re going off going out, cutting back on food, and wearing our clothes to death. The cost-of-living crisis has forced us to spend so much on bills that we’re cutting back all over the place. However, there are some things we refuse to give up.

The ONS has been looking into how spending has changed since Coronavirus restrictions ended. It found that almost two thirds of people have cut spending on non-essentials, and although social spending recovered as restrictions eased, it is falling again. One of the most striking changes affects food, because 49% of people are buying less of it.

We’re also delaying all sorts of spending we don’t desperately need today – which covers things like clothes, household goods and cars. It feels like the wrong time to be splashing out on these things when we can make do without.

However, some things have endured. We took up new hobbies when we were forced to spend more time at home, and we’re happy to splash out on them. We’re buying more gardening items, sports equipment, games and toys. We’re also buying more hardware and paint than before the pandemic, as home renovations are still booming.

Meanwhile, older people are more likely to buck the trend for cost cutting. Revolut data showed they cut spending faster at the start of the pandemic than other age groups, so they have more lockdown savings to fall back on. It means that older people are some of the few with the cash to spare for the nicer things in life.

Sarah Coles is a personal finance analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.