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Yesterday I was handed the keys to my own house. My name is Daniel Collins, I'm 37 and I live in Manchester. A few months ago, I never imagined I'd ever write something like this. There wasn't some terrible story behind it. I wasn't drowning in debt. I hadn't lost my job. I wasn't sitting there with my last £20 in the bank. I had a completely normal life. I've been working as an electrician for nearly eleven years. I earn a decent living — usually around £2,400–£2,700 a month after tax, depending on overtime and how busy the month is. My girlfriend, Emily, works at a small dental practice. We've been together for seven years. We rent a two-bedroom flat in Manchester, drive an old Škoda Octavia and once a year we try to get away somewhere for a few days. Basically, a normal life. The one thing we kept talking about was having a house of our own. Not a mansion. Just a decent three-bedroom house somewhere outside the city. A patio. A small garden. Somewhere we could put a barbecue in the summer. Emily even had photos of kitchens she liked saved on her phone. And I always used to laugh and say: “Let's save for the actual house first. Then you can choose the kitchen.” We were saving. But every time we looked at houses on Rightmove around Greater Manchester, reality came back pretty quickly. The places we genuinely liked were usually somewhere around £300,000–£350,000. With the savings we had, our normal salaries and the deposit we could comfortably put down, that meant either waiting quite a few more years or taking on a mortgage bigger than we wanted. So we weren't in a rush. I always thought: “One day.” I have one slightly stupid little habit. A couple of times a month after work, I'll spend £20–£40 on a game on my phone. I've always looked at it roughly the same way someone might pay for the cinema, buy a lottery ticket or have a couple of pints with friends. Just a bit of entertainment using money I could comfortably afford to spend. Sometimes I lost. Sometimes I got
