With a ten percent deposit, how many times your salary would you feel comfortable borrowing?

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Assuming no major credit card debt etc. This is more of a nosey parker curiosity question, after a discussion with a friend.

3 times.

4 as was standard.

More than that is ludicrous.

2.5 times joint salary. I was shocked to see how much more we could get though - more than double.

Mortgage or just cash borrowing?

You can get 4x as standard but with only 10% deposit you might want to have a good look at repayment amounts (interest rates are a lot higher with 10% deposit than 15%).

x3 as a max I reckon.

We were offered 4.5

I was offered up to 4x - I went for 2.5x as that's what I was comfortable with

personally no more than 3. We borrowed 2.5x with a 15% deposit but dh works in an industry badly affected by the recession; he was made redundant twice & then took a massive pay cut. He's pretty much back to pre-recession earnings now but we'd have been screwed if we'd borrowed more. Way too stressful.

It actually relates to my friend. Her mortgage is 4.5 times her salary, which I thought was incredibly high. I had always assumed x3 maximum.

I'd think more about repayment capacity than the amount of the mortgage. I'd borrow the amount that allowed me to repay at about a third or less of my net income.

Which at current interest rates is about 4 times my gross salary.

Completely dependant on the rate and repayments. Our current mortgage is about 1.5 times our income, but we have a high rate due to bad credit and being unable to remortgage.

If we could get a decent rate and long tie-in, I'd be happy to borrow 5/6 times our income.

I'm the main earner in our house - our mortgage is 9 x my salary, probably about 6/7 x joint income. We have a pretty high fixed interest rate but are working towards having 6 months outgoings (mortgage plus bills) saved in the event anything happens my job. I'm currently on mat leave and we're managing ok.
I'd be more concerned with the repayments rather than how many times my salary I was borrowing. Plus here, you wouldn't get anything for 3/4 times the average salary.

4 times.

Depends what the repayments are, that the important bit.

We're borrowing 4.5* and we have a 15% deposit.

It is affordable for us without stretching hard

Depends on what you earn!
Repayments on a 60k loan, earning 20k are much harder to manage than repaying a 600k loan earning 200k!

I think its putting the cart before the horse thinking about the deposit and then deciding how many multiples you feel comfortable borrowing.

It would be best to start with an example house purchase price then work back to see what you'd feel comfortable with, as pobble correctly points out it is the monthly payments that is the key part. Also your monthly salary of course

Say for example you want to aim towards a £200,000 property which is a reasonably average price.

10% deposit only takes off £20,000 (scarily!), so you have to find £180,000 plus not forgetting all the anxiliary costs.

£180,000 means you need to borrow 4x your salary if you earn £45k with likely monthly repayments of >£1200 per month at the current rate of interest.

I would be worried about that! It doesn't give you a lot of slack in the system for living expenses or emergencies

In 2006 I borrowed 6 times my actual salary (4 times my salary plus tax credits) with a 10% deposit.

I thought it was great at the time. I had cheaper housing (int only) than renting for years.

But now, with hindsight and the recession and unemployment, it was a mistake.

It's a really difficult dilemma.

Our mortgage was 5x take home salary when we got it. We're in London, so this wasn't a big home, but we could have brought it down to a lower multiple by moving further out from the centre. I agree what pp have said about it depending on actual earnings. We can comfortably afford the mortgage (and overpayments), because our salaries still leave a decent disposable income even though a large percentage is taken up with mortgage repayments. Also, our careers are going well and we've both had pay rises since we took out the mortgage two years ago.

At the moment, not so much as prices have already risen a fair bit since the dip. When prices hit rock bottom we speculated.

2.5, 3 maximum

addicted has it, it's not linear, the marginal returns to money diminish sharply. In plain english, if you earn enough to meet the other costs of living easily (food, bills, petrol, and so on) then a higher multiple is less of a stretch. You'll probably be less risk averse too.