If your monthly take-home pay was £4,500...

[mronion]

...what would be the maximum amount you were prepared to spend on rent/mortgage a month? One child, no childcare costs, commuting costs of circa £400 p/month, no car, no other major outgoings apart from food and all the usual utilities.

And would you think, given the above, that that was a lot to live on or not very much?

Trying to settle a debate with DSIL.

Lenders usually set their maximum mortgage repayment at one third of your monthly income, so £1500?

Max £1500. Bigger house = more council tax, heating bills, electricity, furniture to buy etc. Large stamp duty too.

OK so the 4.5 take homers are us (well, my DH). He is on 95k. I don't work at the moment but I pick up bits of freelance work here and there. DS is 3 and I'm at home with him apart from the 15 free hours he gets at nursery. Take home is 4.5k roughly after all taxes and pension contributions. He also gets a fairly large annual bonus but we don't ever take this as a given.

I grew up dirt poor, seriously, hand to mouth. I feel so grateful and lucky every single day that we have this much money. I think it's loads. I am SO AWARE we could lose it all especially with brexit. We previously paid £1350 p/m mortgage for a 2 bed flat we bought in 2015 for 345k in zone 3, London. We have just moved to a 3 bed house in the SE which we bought for 450k and our mortgage repayments are roughly £1850. Fixed rate, 3 years. No plans for more DC.

Basically SIL and BIL are absolutely minted (BIL earns double what DH does) and SIL was when she found out how much our mortgage was, how could we possibly afford it on our take home pay, how do we have money left over.

So I see by the wide range of answers here that some would agree with her which I get. If someone had told me growing up I would spend this much a month on a mortgage I'd have pissed myself laughing. But somehow she always manages to make me feel like I'm the poor relative which is completely absurd. Just needed a reality check tbh.

Our mortgage is £1400 and we have plenty spare after bills. We could spend £2500 on the mortgage and still be comfortable.

£1850 on mortgage, £400 on commute, £500 on bills and utilities, life insurance etc, £400-£500 on food inc takeaways but not meals out. We put £400 a month in savings too.

I mean that leave us with £900 disposable income. I don't know how anyone can say that's not a lot!!! I think of growing up and my mum would be searching down the back of the sofa for pennies to buy tins of beans and crying because our school shoes had holes and she couldn't buy us new ones.

I'm writing all this in a bit of a tizz and I'm aware it probably sounds like a stealth boast but it's honestly not...I just genuinely never thought I would be so lucky and it's not very nice when SIL says the things she does.

DH and i take home that between us per month, both work full time from home, zero commuting costs. We have 1 in full time childcare and another in school. Our mortgage is a little less than yours, about £1480 a month, but we have about £1k in childcare fees. We live quite comfortably but once the childcare fees disappear in 18 months we'll feel much more comfortable. I think you can live quite well as you are really! Plus once little one is in school there is scope for you to work and will make things even easier.

She sounds insecure - you sound like you have a lovely life and you aren’t in competition with her.

How on earth did she find out your mortgage payments? She sounds like a nosy bitch!

accio DH told BIL. Don't get me started. She also looked up how much we paid for the house on zoopla.

So you have £2250 pm after your mortgage and commuting costs and your SIL thinks this isn't enough?

You could blow her tiny mind by tellling her that some people don't even start with this amount of money to pay their housing costs, bills and everything else.

If I were you, I'd ignore SIL, because she's delusional, and just focus on your own lives. If you're happy enough on your regular income, I'd even go as far as using the bonus and your freelance income to overpay the mortgage, or otherwise save for the future (do you have a pension, for example) to provide a cushion against potential hard times - when you have a high income and live up to it, you have to keep getting that income, so will really really struggle if affected by redundancy, illness etc takes it away from you.

First, of course that's a lot of money in terms of both the world and national average. It's enough not to have to worry and often not to have to think about money. That's an enormous luxury: it's comfort, and it's privilege. But it's not wealth, not in the sense that you don't have to think about what would happen if the salary stopped for some reason--I suppose I mean it's not enough to generate money on its own.

As for what I'd do with that money, I'm quite conservative with my spending/planning. A legacy of familial immigrant mentality, I suppose. I'd be saving more than £400/month if I could, to plan against all eventualities. £400 seems like quite a lot in the abstract, but that's less than £5k/year, which could easily be taken up by an unexpected home expense let alone redundancy. If you have £900 in disposable income and £400 in savings, I'd probably flip the numbers and do something like £1000 in savings and £300 in disposable income, at least until you have a pot of a year's salary to tide you over in case of need.

Forgive my ignorance on this count, but are British people starting to save for their kids' university funds, or is the expectation that students will take loans? For most middle-class Americans who can, parents will sock away as much money for their kids' universities, realizing that it won't cover the cost but not wanting their kids to bear the full brunt.

I'm very old fashioned old, but itsn't the affordable amount for rent/mortgage supposed to be 1/3 of your take home pay?

I think in London and the south east where housing costs are insane astronomical, an awful lot of people have to pay more than this sadly. I'd be interested to know if average rents are more than 1/3 of take home pay in other parts of the UK?

If SIL says anything like that again just look at her patronisingly and say "Don't beat yourself up SIL, we can't all be good with money and investments"

She is a stupid bitch

me and partner have around 2k a month after tax and pensions etc then we have to pay rent of £360 c/t of £110 then after bills and food (we rarely eat out) car, childcare etc we have nothing, at this moment i actually have £40 in the bank and just under 2 weeks to payday. in a few months im hoping to have a full time contract in my job so i can start putting money away and actually save. i live in a crap area and its hard to find full time jobs. i would love to say i own my own home but i need to remember i have to pay for repairs aswell. just be happy that you are in a comfortable position and tell her its none of her business!! now im away googling to see what kind of jobs earns you that amount of money (i dont mean that in a cheeky way, i can dream though of having an income like that)

It's about priorities isn't it. E.g. it's nice to have some money for holidays on that kind of income but if you can't have that and a decent sized house you might choose the house. I wouldn't really want to go above 1500 but I would stretch it if that wasn't enough.

A third of take home pay is pretty meaningless because if you earn £1500 and your mortgage is £500, that is an entirely different situation to your take home being £4500 and your mortgage being £1500 or even higher, as you have much less money left over to pay for everything else.

And even if house prices are much higher in the south, other things are about the same, or even cheaper - public transport is cheaper in London than many other places for example, eating out can be quite cheap due to lots of competion, and there are lots of free activities etc, that means people don't need to spend money on days out - lots of free museums and a travel pass that you have anyway gives you the possibility of a very cheap day out.

Max £600, where I live you can buy a 5 bedroom detached house, with a mortgage off £600. No point in paying more when you do not need too.

Your age is relevant given mortgage term. I honk the balance you have is fine though.

Max £600, where I live you can buy a 5 bedroom detached house, with a mortgage off £600. No point in paying more when you do not need too.

Yes but I suspect where you are DH would not earn anywhere near the kind of money he does in London, so it's all relative isn't it.

His entire bonus goes into savings btw, the 400 p/m is more a top up for things like broken fridges, holidays, unexpected repairs.

And we are 31 and 34.

SIL is weird about the fact we aren't sending DS to private school, for instance.

I did used to work and that brought in an extra £1600 a month roughly (though £700 of that went on childcare!) but I worked for a charity which lost its funding and what I do is quite niche so I haven't managed to find anything equivalent since, though as I say I do pick up some freelance work and will be table to take on more of it once DS is at school.

I wouldn’t want to spend more than 25% of my income on my mortgage payment.

This is, IMO, a silly way to look at it.

Much more sensible to think about what you want/need to have left over to spend on everything else.

I’d feel like a pig in muck if I earned that!

Your SIL cannot believe you spend so much on mortgage because she is probably paying private school fees? In the SE, that would be about £1,500 a month, the cost of a mortgage for each child.