Vicky

You can't say "remotely similar to" or "remotely related to" without a negative. "A is not remotely similar to B" means A and B share nothing in common.

Similarly, if prices crash, sad trombone but as long as you don’t NEED to move for reasons outside your control, it doesn’t actually matter. Just keep paying the mortgage, and eventually if/when you want to move, go through the same process again to figure out what you can afford at the time.

Also, once you have worked out what you can afford and bought a property - don’t worry about what the housing market does after that. If prices go up, whoop-de-doo, your house is now worth twice as much as you paid for it! But the house you might have wanted to trade up to is also now twice as expensive, etc.

and yes, prices vary massively across the country. If you can work remotely and don’t have any ties to London you can get a LOT more house for your money almost anywhere else.

Yes, the 12% was I think what it briefly hit at one point in the late 80s. As @GS-ApologisetoMonica says, though, if that does happen it’s only brief and salary inflation would quickly balance it out. I agree with them also that 7% for mortgages is a reasonable “upper bound” on what to check for.

@aglearner please let me know if this makes more sense if you want more information.

@aglearner I asked for this to be moved to chat because it felt like there was still useful discussion going on and the comments on an answer to a closed question didn't quite seem the right place for it.

Some would undoubtedly say I’m on the cautious side. However if you look at a mortgage amount and rates of 4 or 5% would really make you squeak, to my mind that’s not affordable.

I realise you’re talking about 5 year fixed rates and it’s hard to know what your own circumstances might be in 5 years.

@aglearner Bear in mind I am not a financial advisor… but when I did my budget calculations I checked up to 7% sustained rates and up to 12% for a few months wouldn’t bankrupt us.

@aglearner "What if I wait for half a year and buy it for even lower price? Am I making a mistake in my reasoning?" - not so much a mistake, but the flip side of that is "What if I wait for half a year and then the price has gone up by another £50k or £100k?" which I realise is what you were trying to get at with your question - but the sad reality is that nobody knows what is going to be the situation with house prices in a particular area in 6 months or a year, so buy when it makes sense to you and try not to worry about whether you could have timed it better.

I have done hundreds of technical interviews over the years and have had a fair few "MY SOLUTION DOES WORK" emails. I can't think of a single occasion where the email has changed my mind on the decision, and in almost every case the issue was not in fact that I mistakenly didn't believe that the candidate's solution would work, but because the candidate had not properly understood the question (perhaps they missed a constraint, or made a false assumption) and despite my attempts to explain the angle they were missing they could not see what I was getting at.

@jamesqf I know next to nothing about cars in general, and even less about US-ian models and how they are perceived. I have a 17 year old son but he cares nothing about cars either so is no help to me in this regard! However, if a 17 year old is considering going into debt for an expensive car then they are clearly thinking about it as more than simply a means of transport - whether or not they are right about whether this particular car is going to give them the status they want.

I think it would not hurt to raise a gentle flag that some people may not be in a position to contribute much / at all: maybe they don't have much themselves, or they actively don't support the charity that the company has chosen, or they prefer to direct their charitable giving differently as you do. For these reasons making it anonymous is far preferable (and JustGiving etc make it easy to do this). You don't have to raise this as "I don't want to give in this way", just "some people might prefer not to give in this way". [Aside: Hello Kuba! We worked together in the past :-) ]

What about the fact that something like E. Coli or S. Aureus lives in, on and around our bodies without causing any problems, but if it gets into the wrong place it makes you ill. There are many "friendly bacteria" that we need and therefore could not eliminate from the colony, but they could still cause illness.

While all the answers are good, no-one has actually questioned your assumptions. The way it works in the US and the way it works in Europe are, for your purposes, identical. So you might just as well ask “Can one live in Europe without a credit card” and the existing answers would all be just as valid.

Are you male or female? If female, could there be a hormonal component? (Even if you had not experienced this before, your cycle and your reactions to it can change over time).

Agreed with all of this, and one additional point is that the quoted APR almost certainly won't be available to you anyway if you have no credit history. Even adding yourself to your parents' cards won't have any significant impact on your score in enough time to make a difference.