Buying a house: wanting to keep a very large amount of savings

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wife and I are in the process of looking for a house. We are in our early 40s with 2 primary school aged children. Our financial situation isnt great: we have a joint income of £80k and a deposit of £300k (after selling our previous home).

we are looking at a certain area where house prices are around £550k to £600k for a 3 bed house.

We have viewed a house on the market for £615k, it’s ideal but needs a lot of work to make it liveable - at least £40k.

I’d like to stick to buying a house around £550k to £600k mark which doesn’t require any work, as I’d like to keep at least £36k in savings.
I am the main earner but have suffered from health issues, so i really think we need to have a large savings pot. My wife thinks different and has her heart set on this house. It’s started to cause a lot of tension between us.

It sounds like the house your wife has her heart set on is completely out of your budget and no matter how much you love a place, that will wear off in time. Have you tried sitting down together and making a list of pros and cons?

When poverty walks through the door love flies out of the window.

You can't afford the house.
It's a joint decision.
Look at more houses.

If you are worried about your health and long term earning potential, you are right to want a safety net. I hope you can find a house you both like.

What needs doing? Only 40k worth of work is really not “a lot of work”. If you start pricing it up properly you might find it is completely unaffordable

Our financial situation isnt great: we have a joint income of £80k and a deposit of £300k

🙄

You don't get much done for 40k I'm afraid. Tradesmen are SO EXPENSIVE right now and heavily in demand.

Right?! 🤣 Little bit out of touch with the real world! Poor things, limited to a half million pound house.

Buy a cheaper house

This is a great financial situation. You're just being difficult

Look for something more affordable.

By the way, your financial situation is fine and you have a lot more money than most people.

That is pretty much the minimum in London.

If you’re in london and the house isn’t liveable and needs a lot of work 40k isn’t going to touch the sides of what you’ll end up spending on it….

YABU for thinking this isn't a great financial situation. However, you cant afford the house that your wife wants. That doesn't mean your financial situation isn't great. I cant afford the million pound house in the next town, because we all have our limits of what we can afford.

I agree 😂

Why does it have to be London?For a third of that you could buy a house elsewhere,and have enough savings to never work again.What is keeping you in London?

Buy the house, do it up and if you find your health goes downhill then you can sell it and you would have make a good profit. This is what we have always done. Good luck

Enough savings to not work again??!!! Wtf? How?

The OP has not asked for opinions on living in London. They have their reasons for wanting to stay in the area. Nor has the OP asked for judgement on their finances, which are tight for wanting a family home in the south east (but granted better than other places in the UK)

OP I agree with wanting to save guard savings if you are worried about ill health. Any decent financial adviser would be advising along the same lines and arranging protection for you. Is that an option?

I wasn't judging on their finances.It was a genuine question.The OP stated they wanted to save guard savings,also had concerns about ill health.Yet still wanted advice on a forum about buying a house in one of the most expensive places to live?So yes,i did want to know what was keeping them there

You are very sensible to want to keep
a safety net; anything can happen in life, we are all one diagnoses, one redundancy away from our circumstances changing quickly. You’ve got to give yourself some breathing space to make arrangements if the worst happened. Whilst I agree there are times in one’s life where it’s worth pushing it a bit, this would mean buying the nicest house you can even if you can’t afford to do it up (as long as it’s habitable) knowing you can then turn to improvements later down the line as and when you’ve saved enough; what it doesn’t mean is biting off more than you can chew. I would be so stressed. A 36k buffer really isn’t very much; it’s less than 12 months salary if you get sick, and I’m assuming you couldn’t live on one of your salaries alone, so really it’s 6 months only.

Thwre are also always surprises when you buy- broken boiler, dodgy electrics etc etc you must build in a buffer even just for that kind of thing let alone a safety net.

YANBU because in London, that joint income is relatively small, and a 300K deposit on a family home means taking out a huge mortgage.

People aren’t getting you live in London, and your lives are there. Unless you want to move to Leeds (for example) and pay outright for the house, which (understandably) you may not want to.

I think you should be open about you feel because to have that mortgage round your necks and no savings would be a really vulnerable place to be in, and maybe very stressful, particularly on you when you’re the main earner.

I agree. My friend has been quoted £40k for a new kitchen. She can probably do very cheaply for 15/20k. I’m looking at 8k for a new bathroom.

What kind of work is needed on this house?

Just realised you’re in London. That will be significantly more.

So they buy house for £200k in Newcastle, and then support a family on the other £100k for the next 40 years?

They want to buy in London because presumably that is where their jobs are. They do not have enough savings to buy a house outright and both give up work if they are in their 30s/40s, with a young family, and only have £300k.

Why is everyone going off the deep end about the cost of houses? This isn’t new information. I’m not even in London, I’m in Manchester, and the prices the OP is quoting aren’t that different from what we’d expect to pay.

It would be a no from me.

Your limit is £600k and house needs at least 40k of work so you would need to get it for around £550k.