If you have £120K you have enough to buy if you change location
Aternately look for cheaper rental (easier with one dog rather than 2) then save up what you save each month with view to getting enough for what you want.
You havent said what you do as a job ... worth thinking of a retrain?
At 25 I wouldnt have been able to get a mortgage either (I'm 60 now!) ......it is not normal for a single person in their 20's to buy a house ..... and it never has been!
However, it is an excellent idea to get onto the ladder as soon as you can. My husband and I bought our first house at 25, not our ideal home, but it filled our needs at the time and got us onto the ladder. We were skint for years (in fact we probably still are with the way national finance is going now) but we never regretted buying our first house. As an endorsement, both our sons had also bought their first houses by the same age.
The thing is that it's 'either/or', you can't buy a house young then also go on exotic holidays, eat in restaurants and buy top end fashions; it's a compromise that many younger folk today are not prepared to make.
If you are prepared to go your own way [member=208497]Natalie95[/member] then I wish you loads of luck. So sorry about your older dog too - losing our companions is so very hard.
I quite agree. It's all a matter of choices.
I bought my first house as a single woman (yes I'm female!) of 25 at a time when the large building societies wouldn't even consider a single woman for a mortgage. I had a mediocre job and also worked one evening and weekends and saved up a mortgage of 25%.
As Backinwellies said - there are affordable locations. You can still get a house near here I live in Goole for £80,000 and it is certainly not an area you would be frightened to live in. In parts of Lancashire, or in the NE you can get houses for even half that.
My first house was a terrace has that had once been included in a clearance area, but subsequently was improved with grants. Once purchased I got 2 other people in to share it with me and that paid the mortgage plus some. With my weekend earnings, I then had enough to live on without touching my main wage. In a year I had enough cash to buy a small terrace house for cash to rent out. I then bought one house a year, cash for the next 3 years.
Somewhere along the line I got married and the property empire stood still for a while, but it gave me an income so I didn't need to work. But I bought a few properties at auction, sold them at a profit and with the cash was able to buy my first field - 3.6 acres - just half a mile down the road. Since then, over the years, I have bought another 24 acres all for cash. We never had a foreign holiday for years, apart from our honeymoon. But we still had trips out and enjoyed life.
So what I'm saying is that nothing is impossible, and you can never say "never". You can achieve anything if you want it enough.