To buy a £700k house on £67k

[Polledja]

My wife and I are looking to buy a house. I was very foolish with my money during my younger days so am behind my peers.
we want a house near a good school and houses in that area range from £550k to £700k. The ones my wife likes are at the higher end but I don’t think we can afford these. She has become withdrawn and depressed during this process and it caused allot of tension.
I have approx £280k for a deposit (this is all our savings bar £18k). We can borrow £350k based on our joint salaries of £67k. It leaves me £90k short. I think I could borrow this from family.

our net pay is £3900 per month. We would have £2000 tonoay on our mortgage leaving us with £1900 to pay everything else. We have two young kids at school. Our monthly expenses excluding our mortgage are about £1600 so it would meaning having nothing left each month

You can't be that bad with money if you managed to save £280k. Can I ask the split of the £67k, how much do you earn?

I've never heard of anything so silly

You cannot afford it.

The op isn't coming back to this thread!

It will be an even harder conversation if things don't work out an you are in a position where the bank is chasing you for money that you don't have. Please be careful and conservative and protect yourself and yourself and your family from a future nightmare.

thanks for you comments. Our total income is approx £80k but I contribute a massive amount to my pension to bring my gross pay under 50k, to keep the child benefit .
we have both reached the max in terms of our income, it’s not goin up massively

It's unlikely that bank would lend this to you, you wouldn't pass the stress test. It's a terrible idea, your numbers don't work at all. With 280k and your salary you'd be looking at buying a house at 500k max I reckon.

Why don’t you fill in the mortgage in principal online. I did it with Halifax and if out of hours you get it back the next day. This tells you how much you can borrow and I’m sure it won’t be the answer your wife wants but takes it out of your hands. We have just moved and not only is our mortgage more than double so is our council tax, energy has risen though not massively. All this with rising shopping and petrol costs are making things much more tight for us.

We still have a some left over and thankfully I just got a pay rise. We only have one child and it’s constant new shoes/uniforms/club fees. Being skint isn’t a nice place to be, a lot more depressing than not getting the house you want!

Where I live in the SW you wouldn't be able to afford a shed for 300k.

Given the way things are at the moment and the fact that your mortgage could increase I think this is very unwise.

Your wife is an idiot. Your wife will still be depressed when she can't socialise, go on holiday, or afford Christmas presents because every spare penny has gone on the house.

The financial catastrophe is clear. However long-term, the relationship dynamics are interesting and relevant. Who currently earns more, who has more earning potential over time, and are they going to maximise it? Who amassed the savings? Do you have shared ideas about how the rest of your income should be spent?

We're all being terribly polite about it, but is your wife going to want to run up tens of thousands in debt on a designer kitchen or destination holidays or gold wallpaper too? People who insist on a fancy house in a desirable area tend not to be happy eating beans on toast or holidaying in a caravan.

It may well be that your relationship is the underlying problem - so have a contingency plan for separating into two homes.

Same. Utterly bizarre.

You can’t afford it OP, your wife needs a wake up call. What about stamp duty, moving costs, solicitors fees?

I wouldn’t live beyond my means as I like to sleep at night.

We have a decent "whack" set aside for a rainy day and we live day to day without fear of bills etc. Having a "big fancy house" isn't important to us either. But where we live we paid 565k for a perfectly modest 3 bedroom semi, with 20% deposit, on a fixed 5 year mortgage costing 2.2k a month. Income (single) is 6.5k take home a month so mortgage is over 30% of that. We aren't even slightly struggling, no belt tightening. I'm honestly astonished by some of these comments even though I think OP would be mad to buy a 700k house.

That's a bit daft the other way. Not to mention that where I live that wouldn't buy you more than a flat...

We bought £750k house on £100k salary. With the idea being that we’d soon earn more. And we did..
But also we were selling in london and had made a £200k on our flat.

My husband and I have a joint salary of a bit more than that and even when banks were slack on affordability we were not offered more than £220k. I'm bloody glad we did not max out on the mortgage we were offered.

Unexpected things do happen. We can afford our mortgage and key bills on a single salary (mine or my husbands). Mine wouldn't be a pretty life but it would keep a roof over our heads. There is immense peace of mind along with that. We have sacrified the type of house we bought though, but a roof is a roof.

Location, location, location

If you have a joint income of 67k and you earn over 50k, as you say you pay lots into your pension to ensure you keep your Child Benefit, what is your wife going to do to increase her salary, which is under 17k? That is how she can afford her dream home, by increasing her earning. Nor being realistic with what she wants.

Our net monthly pay is around £5k and we bought a house for £450k, I remember feeling nervous about that if one of us lost our job!

So is your wife's take home pay 17k? Is she full time?

I doubt the OP has ‘saved’ £280k on their income, having been previously bad with money, unless they have been living rent free for years and years so presume they have come into money through an inheritance or a premium bonds win. The large deposit doesn’t necessarily mean they have been clever with money.

If I have understood correctly, your wife earns £17k?

I would ask how she is going to increase her income to afford the house she thinks she deserves, or to shut up about it.

Sorry, saw your joint income was 80k, with yours over 50, so guessing wife salary about 20k.