if you live in a big house, do you regret the size of your morgage

[Lardlizard]

Or are you glad ?

Wow @byvirtue £1300 for 5000 sq ft! Out mortgage is a bit less for a lot lot less space ( LTV 50%) 😭😭

Ours slightly more for less than half the size on an LTV of 20%.
Serves me right for living in London!

How big are we talking here previous posters?

This is a really interesting post for me as we are considering moving and would be more than doubling our current mortgage payment and term.

@ChazsBrilliantAttitude London here too, just wish I was an adult in the 80s & 90s & could have got on the ladder then!

Ours is 3700sq feet - not vast but needs a lot of maintenance. It's an arts and crafts house and quite quirky. Also v large mature gardens which need a gardener and extensive ladders. I would agree that it isn't the mortgage but the maintenance that could be the killer. Utilities and council tax are high too. There is always something that needs doing. As I've said upthread the lightbulbs are almost continuous. Add on a garage block, etc., and it all adds up.

We are very close to London and moved about 5 years ago to dodge what felt the grim reality of Corbyn's mansion tax.

I've got the opposite problem, if I can call it that. Due to illness I had to down-size from a two-bed bungalow with garage, conservatory and a beautiful garden to a two-bed town house with off-road parking and it's just that little bit too small, if cosy. I've never had the house of my dreams.
It's easy to heat and is in a good position. Lack of elbow room means I must be careful when vacuuming the stairs so that I don't knock pictures off the wall. There's little storage. I'm grateful to have a roof over my head but will always hanker after a bit more space.

It was great as a family home but since my marriage fell apart and one dc went away to university it seems too much, way too large for 2. I'm getting a lodger, not really for the money but for the company

LED lights are great and need replacing much less often

Yep, I agree Rhianfitz. Also remember a two bed flat with a 60w lightbulb in 6 places and a track with three bulbs in the kitchen.

We have 22 bulbs LED or otherwise in the drawing room alone. Just had a quick look. Fuck know how many elsewhere!

Ours is 3000 square feet, plus four basement rooms, plus garage. An acre of gardens/woods.

We do a lot of the DIY ourselves, and we do all the cleaning and gardening. We've done things like replace the garage roof, replace the kitchen and two bathrooms, decorate throughout, replace doors, etc.

We did have someone come in to replace all the downstairs windows but it wasn't all that expensive.

A few years ago we had 6 huge trees taken out for $1k but other than that we generally take out trees ourselves, and chop up any useful wood to burn. We take the rest to the local dump. DH bought a pickup truck a long time ago.

I am going to get someone in to redo the floor in 3 rooms downstairs and sand/refinish the remaining floors, as I am knackered from us doing it all ourselves.

We have someone plough our drive when it snows - we share it with the neighbour which helps keep down the cost, but it's probably still $500-1000 a year.

We had the drive resurfaced a few years ago and I think that was $15k (again we shared the cost).

We share a ride-on mower and ride-on snowblower with our neighbour, and we have another snowblower of our own, and a generator. Also DH has at least 3 chainsaws. And we need 4WD or snow tyres just to get up and down our drive in winter.

Certainly things add up, even if you do a lot yourself.

Ours is 8000 square feet on an acre (affluent NYC suburb). I don’t regret the mortgage, but I do think we will want to downsize on space once our children have gone to college.

8000 sq ft is huge. I can't actually imagine needing a mortgage if I had enough moneybfor that much space in an affluent suburb of NYC.

@OhtheRoses, I’ll be honest and say that we didn’t have the savings to cover an outright purchase, but we put down thirty percent and will pay off the mortgage quickly.

Well all I can say is that 3700 seems plenty big enough.

Ours is 6000 sq ft in London, Georgian home that requires fairly expensive maintenance. Thankfully we don’t have a mortgage anymore, but the maintenance costs continue! We will downsize once all the children have flown the nest.

@OhTheRoses, it’s a function of where we live. Homes tend to be 5000-12000 square feet.

Our other home is 3500 square feet, and it’s definitely roomy, but the excess of space in our new home affords extras like a gym and playroom, which are both godsends in the depths of winter.

We decided not to go all out and I'm relieved.

I couldn't live under that level of stress. I've had a finite level of financial stress and now I've got shingles.

Massive mortgage = no from me.

Our house is sub 4000sq ft and we’ve easily fitted in a gym and a cinema room. I think not going too big has its appeal as the cleaner still manages to clean the place in one day a week. I once visited people living in a humongous pile and they had several full time staff living on premises. I thought the lack of privacy sucked.

I have no idea how many square feet my house is! I don’t have room for a cinema though

A family member ( same age as myself ) married the same year I did. They opted for a large mortgage ( beautiful home - 3 bedrooms ) we opted for 1 bedroom apartment ( surprisingly spacious). There monthly out goings a 1k more than ours meaning we go on holidays, have a new car and can buy luxury things we want and have savings. I would love a big posh house but it just isn’t worth giving up everything else. It’s a place to live at the end of the day and yes things might be different if we have children but while we are relatively free it works better

It's a nice house and most of our mortgage debt went on extending and improving it, but the mortgage has been huge and for the past 10 years we have been utterly dependent on my job while DW went from maternity to career break to a PT job. It's taken an inheritance on my surviving parent's death to break the back of it and it still looks like another 5 years of scrimping and saving and throwing every penny at it before we're done and might be able to think about retirement.

It always grates a little that when we were house hunting there was a house that on the face of it cost 50% more but needed very little done to it. I preferred it but lost the argument. I think if we'd stretched for that we would have had an easier time, though I suppose what we have now is probably worth more than that one is.

They haven't though mistycloud. Not really. My viewpoint might be coloured by the fact I live in an area where property prices keep rising but their home will have increased in value over their ownership and they will also have paid off equity. They could always move back to their previous cheaper area and would probably have a cash lump sum. But I expect they would rather live in their bigger house.

We have a large old house, we don't have a mortgage but we can't afford to repair it as and when it is necessary. We absolutely love our home, but is the money pit and I doubt it will ever be plush, warm and decorated like a new build, but it does have the high ceiling and period detail that is harder and harder to cone by.

I might not always live in a large house, but I will always live in old houses.

In urban areas you can rent out a room or convert into a good size family house and a smaller flat for a rent thus making your accomodation cost lower. Buying 6 bedroom property (6 bedrooms should have 2 kitchens and minimum 2 bathrooms) and renting out 2 bedrooms might work out CHEAPER than buying 3 bedroom property. No, I don't regret doing that.