Mortgage anxiety!!

[Dofasurfa]

Hi,
we’ve been approved for a mortgage of 3k per month against monthly take home if 8k combined. I know it’s manageable but I’ve hit. Bit of a mental block of taking on a payment of this scale.
does anyone else pay a mortgage that’s proportionate with these amounts?

Make sure you have income protection insurance and mortgage payment protection insurance. Mortgage of less than 40% of your take home pay should be manageable.

Yours sounds high! I account for about £1k on direct debits.

£300 council tax
£150 energy
£40 water
£30 internet
£50 phones
£100 insurance (house, car)

Plus a few direct debits for Netflix, cleaning and stuff.

What’s your £2k on?

Ours is similarly proportionate. Is your equity going to be high? Can you extend out the term or do you have savings if things go wrong?

we went from a mortgage that was 10% of our net pay a month to 35% of our net base pay. We definitely feel it. Before we had lots of money spare to spend on whatever we wanted and went on holiday a lot. Now I’m not flippant with purchases and we save much less. But we are mid 30s, our house is very big and has all the facilities we wanted etc so hopefully won’t have to move again.

Our take home is £9.5k and mortgage £3300. Not ideal but it’s fine. We just ensure we have a good buffer always in savings (£80k currently) and we also have unemployment insurance for the mortgage.

It's doable but it is a lot of money.

Things I'd consider are is your combined 8k income roughly 4k each or is there an imbalance in your earning? I'd be concerned if it's heavily skewed then that is a lot of pressure on the higher earner (although does give more scope for the lower earner to increase their earnings).

I'd also look at what the repayments could be if you have a fix which doesn't last for the full term of the mortgage, especially if you would not be able to extend the term of the mortgage.

And then I'd consider how easy it is likely to be to sell the house if you changed your mind and wanted to live somewhere else.

Similar boat, take home around 8000, modest home with small mortgage but huge school fee pushes fixed outgoing to over 4000 before the vat, extremely anxious now.

Can you go interest only on part of the mortgage? This would bring the monthly payments down in the event of job loss. But you can still pay as if the whole lot is repayment in the meantime.

Hmmm we pay £1300 with an income of £6000. Not sure id want to be much higher as we put money in savings too and like to overpay.

No need to go to top of budget though it's madness to get more house than you need to my mind. We bought a lovely semi and we're doing it up slowly, much more satisfying and nice knowing we've got a buffer!

Bloody hell we only take home £2000 a month between us both and couldn't even dream of a mortgage

I’d be fine with that.

Our new mortgage will be just over 20% of our take home which is fairly manageable. However we do have childcare for another couple of years. So once that is done it will be much easier. You will be at 37.5% of take home which is a fair bit more but only you know your other outgoings so it’s hard to tell.

Completely depends what your other outgoings are. If you've got car payments, loans, childcare costs etc then yes it sounds high. If not then £5k left over sounds perfectly fine.

We were in a similar position to you at a similar time. Our mortgage was around 2/3 of our combined take home pay when we bought our previous house. We went on holiday between exchange and completion and while we were away, our interest rate went up to 18%. It only stayed that high for a very short time, but it was 16% for a long time and was never in single figures while we lived in the house. We cut back hugely on our food bill, had almost no social life for a couple of years and no holidays for about four years, but it was worth it. Every spare penny we had was spent on renovating the house, which took several years to finish, but we wanted our house and as you said, we managed.

Depends. I mean the numbers were different but we always spent one third of our takehome on mortgage payments. Shortened the term if rates were low, then had the equity in the back pocket just in case hard times came back ( we lost hugely on our first house in the 1990s and it set us back loads)
If you have decent equity, I wouldn't stress too much about it.

We make 9.5k monthly combined and new mortgage will soon be 3.5k, similar worries here but think a lovely home is worth it.

Jesus...calm down

We have a take home pay of 7700/m and our mortgage is 1000.

We have one cheap car owned outright that we share (not through want) and of our four children one is in nursery. A handful of pets and one (nearly free) holiday a year.

We don’t struggle day to day, but would be utterly fucked if one of us lost our job/couldn’t work etc.

We are debating making a similar decision (8k income, currently 1.5k mortgage to go up to 2.8k if we move). I was advised to try to live as if we were paying the higher mortgage for a few months to see if we could manage. Ideally we would want to save too so that was helpful to think this way. Our bills and total outgoings are around 6k including mortgage so a 1.3k jump would be doable.

We have similar proportion, but you can double both numbers. Probably our bills are more ‘normal’ range which I guess means they sre relatively cheap

Personally, no. We take home around 6k between us, but I’m making 75% of this. Mortgage atm is £920/month, we’re still on a 1.49% fix for nine months though, so will go up.
I am conservative when it comes to financial risk. This, however meant that we could pay all bills when I was furloughed for a year. If our income was more even I’d probably feel happier with a higher mortgage, but like this, no. I know we could manage double as I’m overpaying this, probably even more, but I wouldn’t be happy with the risk if I lost my job or fell ill or something else happened.

That would freak me out unless I had some serious savings as back up. Our income is around 10k and our mortgage just 850! But we bought before the latest crazy hikes in interest rates.

This is MNs so the stock answer will be “we take home 20k and woukd feel nervous paying more than 1k”. But its 2024 & houses are expensive. How much would renting cost?

Our income is around 10k and our mortgage just 850!

As I predicted 😆

What if interest rates double? What if it needs a new roof? What if you get pregnant with twins? What if one of you lost their job? What if one of you became ill?
If you can manage all those scenarios...

Literally the same for anyone buying or renting…

Do you have any other debt?
How long would this mortgage deal be?
Do you currently have an emergency fund?
Are your household spending/ earnings likely to increase/ decrease after this period?

I would probably do it short term but would say no longer than 2 year deal