To get the biggest mortgage have been offered for the house of my dreams?!

[Givemeyouropinion]

Help. A house has come up in our area tjay is the house of our dreams. Almost! It ticks all of the boxes bar one, the third bedroom is small
Which ideally would be double the size. The issue is if we bought the house we wouldn’t be able to make the bedroom bigger or extend d Into the loft as we’d be maxing ourselves with the mortgage payments. Another thing I’m worried about is not having as much disposable incomes for the next couple of years for cars/holidays/treats is it worth tjay for an amazing home?! Both of our income is going to increase in the next couple of years we just don’t know by how much, I just don’t want to miss the opportunity to buy this gorgeous house but I’m scared I’m thinking with my heart rather than my head which I do tend to do 🙈

Irs are v low at the moment and Houses are overpriced in some areas - anecdotes from years ago are not indicative of the same continuing for the next few years .

Over stretching yourself for a 2.5 bedroom house that isn't really your dream home? Sounds like a daft idea to me. And banking on future pay increases seems daft too.

You need to sit down and work out what your priorities are - is it holidays:cars or is it the house? Sounds like there is the potential for resentment by having to give up your luxuries for the "not really my dream home"

We over stretched ourselves 20 years ago to buy our forever home. It was a very dated but beautifully looked after edwardian detached home in a sought after road. We waited 7 years before being able to do major changes like extension, new kitchen and bathrooms (luckily received an inheritance) but 10 years later had to sell when DH lost his job and decided to go into teaching which meant not much salary for 3-4 years. Teaching was a disaster so we sold and downsized to have no mortgage which gave him time to get another job but earning nowhere near what he was getting before. We still miss the other house but have managed to turn this much smaller house into a lovely home and we are mortgage free now. I think if you dont stretch for your dream home now you probably wont later on. Can you find another house that ticks the boxes and has a better 3rd bedroom?

In reality, though, there is not really enough info to go on.

Is the hosue extendable if/when you have the money or is the layout fixed forever? If the latter, then it isn’t your ‘dream house’.

If you’re talking about cutting back on cars/holidays/treats, then that is a sacrifice worth making. If you’re talking about not having enough money to fix the washing machine if it goes wrong, or replace a couple of tyres on the car then you are probably over extending yourself. It’s all relative.

As I’ve said before, we had a few very ‘lean’ years when we first bought our hosue and then again when we had our first child. Annual holiday budget was £400 for several years whereas it had been £3000 before.

We now really do have our ‘dream hosue’ after having extended and refurbished In the way we wanted as finances changed. We could never, ever afford to buy the house we have now, as it is now, if we’d chosen to stay in our last house and enjoy our holidays/treats for a few years.

I won’t say what our holiday budget is now

It needs nothing doing at all, it has just been completely renovated and I love everything they have done with it. It has a huge garden, the only thing we would need to do in the future is extend for an extra bedroom or make the third one bigger or go into the loft.

No way.

If you could only just about manage it with your current circumstances, you’d be a fool to do this. Either one of you could lose your jobs and struggle to find a new one. The fact neither of you have a set date for your anticipated pay rise, nor the figure, is a huge red flag too that it might not happen.

What if one of you becomes seriously ill and can’t work any longer? It may sound like I’m being a doom mongerer but you have to consider these things. Do not stretch yourselves for a bloody house. Anything could happen.

Wait until you get your new pay rises, save all you can until then and then rethink. There will always be lovely houses on the market.

I’d be wary of overextending yourself too far.

What if events mean lower income? Redundancy, babies, ill health etc? Mortgage rates are very low at the minute, chances are they’ll rise before your mortgage is paid off.

When we bought we made a decision to not go for the maximum mortgage offered, but a lower mortgage (and a smaller house), because we wanted some slack built into things in case circumstances changed.

Good decision for us as it turns out - redundancies and 3 DC, including one with SEN, means that my earning capability is not anywhere near what it was when we bought our house, but because we didn’t overextend ourselves, it’s still financially manageable at the minute.

Although we never had a ‘dream house’ that our hearts were set on, so that probably made it easier to avoid maxing out the mortgage.

Can you put up with it as it is forever if you can't afford the extension though?

We gambled a bit on our first place and it paid off, but I would never buy a house I couldn't stay in forever as it was unless I had the funds ready to make it so.

In terms of whether it's stretching too far people's definitions of stretching vary wildly. Plenty on here would think our mortgage is crazy. It's £1,350 a month. Our net pay is around £4.5k a month. After groceries, travel etc we have about £1k to 'play' with but I manage to blow most of that on house stuff quite easily, things like the garden/decorating (we've been here nearly a year). We didn't want to borrow this much, our mortgage is 260k, but it ticked so many boxes. Our first house was a generous 2 bed, we refused to buy a 3 bed with a box room because it would have been useless to us.

I see a house as a home not as an investment. When we bought 30 years ago we went well below what we could have borrowed (though interest rates were at 15% then).
I cannot believe mortgage interest rates will remain as cheap as they are now for much longer.

We're still in that house. Paid off the mortgage very early which meant massive options about work and retirement.

Although your salaries will increase it is expected that interest rates will also increase so you need to factor this is in to your budgeting

Surely the answer to all the 'what if' questions is that you sell your and buy somewhere cheaper! My parents did it, it was great for them to have a load of equity to use from the many years they had lived there, so they could afford a home on only the previously lower, now only, workers income. The wise thing to do, surely!
The 3rd bedroom is another matter. Depends if you think you'll find anything similar in your price range.

I wouldn’t stretch myself for any house . It’s simply not worth it .

No, it would worry me too much to have the biggest mortgage we could. Job loss, relationship breakdown etc could all be around the corner.

We went for something smaller so that we had money to give the chidren a good life and in the event something happens we can afford it in a single wage. Peace of mind is worth a great deal.

Surely the answer to all the 'what if' questions is that you sell your and buy somewhere cheaper!

Exactly. Our house was only just affordable with the two of us working full time and with no kids.

16 years later I have had to retire through ill health and only DH is working. We can still very much afford the mortgage on only his income as inflation and pay rises have diminished the proportion of our income spent on mortgage payments significantly.

We stretched ourselves for our dream house and I don't regret it at all. It's an amazing feeling to be settled where we are and know we'd be happy to stay here until we retire. Sometimes you have to take risks and some people are more comfortable with that than others, it depends on your personality type I guess.

Yes, you could sell up and move somewhere cheaper, or you could look at extending the term of your mortgage, which is what we did in order to finance our extension - we only had a few years left on our original mortgage, so we remortgaged to pay it off in 18 year's time instead. Our mortgage payments now are cheaper than before, and the value of the house has already gone up almost as much as the cost of the extension. We couldn't afford to move and couldn't have found the sort of house we have now, so it's all positive.

but house values are not guaranteed to soar - previous years are not an indication of the trend continuing, neg equity can happen to anyone

I would. We always regret not stretching ourselves to buy a house that we both loved. It needed a lot of work doing to it but, at the time we had the attitude that it had to be done immediately.

Had we done it we would have a lovely 2 bed house with our own drive. Instead we live in a 1 bed maisonette with on road parking and a lease we can't afford to extend! We're happy here and it's a lovely area but we still think 'what if?'

Yes - do it. Follow your heart, if you don't you will always regret it. We didn't make an offer when the house of our my dreams went on the market because we had already made an offer on another and I didn't want to let the vendor down. In the end it was me that ended up loosing out and I regret it to this day. Whenever we drive past the house I still feel a tinge of envy towards the lucky people that did buy it.

We’ve always made a point not to max ourselves, kids won’t feel they missed out in a smaller house but they certainly would if they missed out on going to groups or having holidays. I think balance is always a good idea. We have enough wiggle room in our income that we have flexibility and that seems far less stressful than having a ‘better’ house but feeling broke.

Can you see when you will be more comfortable financially? We bought above our means knowing that in 3 years give or take we'd be more comfortable. It paid off, got the house we've always wanted. So, can you see how long you'd be tight financially and is it manageable?

I'd do it too.
I was mortgage free, before meeting my ex-H.
We bought a much bigger house, to meet his particular needs. He was a high earner, but he left rather quickly (another story).
He then pretended to have left me even earlier on divorce papers- presumably to impress his new girl. Twat, but all good for me financially. I could prove my equity contributions, and he had contributed almost nothing, given the length of marriage that he declared.
I have fought to keep this house. I want my kids to own their own homes, and keeping this one will make that possible.
My lovely DP and I are willing to make sacrifices to pay this mortgage. There is nothing to indicate that property prices will crash any time soon. If they do, we can downsize as needed. Wages have not risen, but they will in time.
For now, we have a very lovely home. My children have not been through unnecessary upheaval, and we have considerable equity.
Property is a useful investment. Holidays are not.

There is nothing to indicate that property prices will crash any time soon. If they do, we can downsize as needed.
if you say so - I can see plenty of indicators that houses in certain areas are way overpriced and no-one is buying.
without the props of low IR and govt intervention - neg equity for those over-extended is a possibility.

**“What if one of you becomes seriously ill and can’t work any longer?”

On that rationale, a single person should never get a mortgage...