To move to a bigger house but have less money ? £1900 mortgage

[Pinkysparkles]

DH and me are both late 40s. Have a 2 and 3 year old. A boy and a girl.

We live in a tiny 2 bed and our mortgage is £900pcm. After tax we clear £5200.

We have bills and nursey fees .But at the end of the month we still have 1500 left. But this is used on savings, holidays and spending.

I want to move from Our tiny two bed soon , especially as we are getting older and don’t want a mortgage into late age. I want the children to have their own bedroom when older.

The house we are looking at , a 3 bed, would take our mortgage payment from 900pcm to £1900pcm. It would be for 20 years.

My obvious worry is that we would have £1000 less a month. Which scares me . Am I crazy to do this. But the alternative is a boy and girl sharing a room forever in our small 2 bed. There is no way we can extend .

Due to our ages , I feel pressure to act. If we do not move I will over pay the mortgage on our current home and we could be mortgage free in 10 years but the house would still be too small.

AIBU to push on with a move in this climate ?
DH as ever , happy so long as I’m happy.

We have no debts or loans for anything .

I would move, you will need a bigger house at some point and the longer you wait the lower term your mortgage bill be..You will still have 500 left which i know it's not alot but surely nursery fees will end in a couple of years and you will have a lot more free money. Might have to tighten the purse strings a little for a while

£900 to £1900 is a huge jump for an extra bedroom, is there nothing in between?
You need to also factor in things like nursery fees that will end in a few years time and your potential to increase earnings e.g. increasing work hours or career progression.
But ultimately, I think agree that longer term you will need another bedroom.

Also look at extending the mortgage term to 30/ 40 years. When you look at another fix or tracker in say 5 years you can always reduce the term again when you’ve got more money coming in.

@Notthatgameagain ! Thats what I’m thinking. Nursery will end and give us extra money and if I’m honest we do waste money. I feel like we could make savings and if we don’t do it we will be stuck.
My only fear would be if one of us lost our job! Which is something I hope would never happen obviously but that is the only issue which would mean we were not able to afford the payments !

I’d do it. You say your term would be 20 years but can you push that up a few more years for the next 5 or so? How old are you?

You can always drop it back down after nursery has finished etc.

It's lovely that your DH just wants you to be happy, but could you point out that you'd be happier if he made a constructive contribution to serious decision making so that it's not all on your shoulders?

Oh sorry, just seen late 40s. You can get a mortgage up to age 90 with some lenders. Obviously you wouldn’t stay with that lender for the whole term , but in the first couple of years it will make a massive difference to your monthly payments.

Nothing in between where you are now and rhe £1,900 mortgage house?

Bear in mind fuel costs, insurance, up keep and council tax will all be more too.

Can you extend the house you are in? Loft conversion?
If not then I would move but would try to find a cheaper house, perhaps one you can do work on as and when you can afford it or in a slightly different, but cheaper area.

This is a tough decision OP.

Your wish for more space will only grow as your kids get older.

We had similar situation (our DC now 14 & 11) - we were able to extend our house, but those bigger repayments in order to do so, really do make a huge difference.
we have to budget very tightly to be able to maintain the same or close to the same lifestyle.

yes, nursery payments won’t be forever, but other child related costs tend to creep up as they get bigger (clothes, food, holidays once they need own rooms etc)

This can be mitigated to an extent by making sure you have the right protection policies in place.

We did something similar a few years ago when my children were 4/7 - moved from a small 3 bed (but with the kids sharing as we have house guests many weeks a year) to a larger 4 bedroom in a slightly nicer area. We don't regret it but we are stretched for sure and the kids have only gotten more expensive as they've gotten older. I think I thought it would go the other way once we weren't paying nursery fees but they're actually much more expensive now - and only going in that direction as my daughter is into adult sized clothing and we need to start thinking about college/university fees soon.

However we don't regret it at all. We love that we can host lots of people (we have friends round for holidays a lot), it's great for the kids to have their own rooms, we really like our neighbours and we have no intention of moving again for at least 10 years or more. We've had to really pull back on holidays and meals out and such but we would probably have done so anyway now that everything is so expensive. We just replaced that with other things - UK weekends and lots of hosting. My kids definitely like that they can have friends round easily now too.

Are your pensions OK?

I would do the move, having budgeted carefully for the higher overheads of a bigger house and factored in all buying and selling costs. And hold on to a rainy day fund.

Your childcare bill will start to go down once your 2 year old gets more free hours, and then 3 year old starts school.. then both at school.

Look at your expenditure and budget carefully to still give yourselves some savings.

Bear in mind Secondary schools when you move.

Then you have options:

Downsize again when Dc are young adults/ pay off mortgage using pension lump sum etc.

I'd move if I were you. 2 beds isn't enough.

With a boy and a girl sharing you are going to either have to move, extend, or someone sleep in the lounge. Moving is probably cheaper than extending, so really it’s a matter of sooner or later.

Does it have to be a £1000 per month increase? Have you searched and made sure there’s nothing in between?

How old are your kids? If you’re paying nursery fees presumably that will stop in the next couple of years then you’ll have more disposable income.

Also, I know you are “older” but consider a 25 year mortgage to keep your monthly repayments lower, then overpay as much as you can. That’s what we are opting for, and downsizing to a cheaper area once the kids are through school.

@AwakeNotThruChoice - unfortunately we are in the south east and this extra bedroom is a huge cost in our area. The house we are looking at is not very big so thankfully council tax band is just one more and bills wouldn’t be huge .
The option is to explore other areas maybe before the children start school but I love where we are .

@SeaAndStars we have explored all options with three different builders and we can’t . Which is frustrating / the house is just tiny and small courtyard garden .

@YesThatsATurdOnTheRug !!! Hahah! I hear you. I think deep down DH would just stay here and go on holidays and chill and enjoy life. Then when the children were teenagers he would say - well it is what it is and there is no more space. I think he is naive that the children won’t need their own space. DH is laid back so I know that if I want this move to happen I will be pushing ahead with it and he will just come on board. He won’t be leading the ship.

I normally say don’t burden yourself with a big mortgage, but a 2 bed with 2 kids of different sexes will feel more and more challenging.

You’re gonna need a bigger house. But maybe not one which has over twice the mortgage attached.

No scope to go up into the loft to create a room ? More than double your mortgage for an extra room seems really high - the new house must offer more than a single bedroom ?

Oh and just a note that a bigger house comes with 'so' many extra bills. The heating, any sort of house maintenance etc. We have to get new windows and we worked out that it's twice as many windows as our old house so therefore thousands more. So it's all that too which we hadn't entirely thought about.

I'd do something between the two options - overpay for a few years and look to move once your eldest is in school and you know she has settled (or before if it gets you into a better catchment)

It will give you a better feel for making those monthly payments and build up equity in the mean time.

Our mortgage payments are 1900 and we bring in a min of 7480 per month. We still manage to save 2500 per month too though as we have no childcare costs. I would say it will be tight until nursery fees are done. How much could you save etc on that. That would be my main concern.

DH and I had a huge mortgage 20 odd years ago (when interest rates were extremely low) which left us little wriggle room in terms of disposable income. It didnt help DH was self employed though. The financial stress put a strain on our marriage, and we ended selling up to move to a cheaper area, which benefited our family in the long run.

If you going to proceed with this, you are going to have to budget and be prepared to make sacrafices.

We were worried we were going to get stuck where far from parents so we moved hundreds of miles to be closer before the kids started school. We had to push ourselves to the limit but it has worked out and now all the kids are out of nursery it's made our savings leap up again. Just make sure you can afford an increase in interest rates. You can also get insurance for mortgage payments if you lose a job or take a mortage holiday so there are ways of dealing with it. We just took staycations and had a tight budget but its worked out well. Work through all the scenarios and figure out what you could do. Better now than later.

Hi All,

Thank you for the replies. The reason the mortgage would be so much higher as due to our ages, unlike our current 30 year mortgage , it would be a shorter term -20 years.

I do think however there is scope for us to look at properties 15-20k cheaper that need work and therefore look to do it that way to save money or consider moving area but we are in such a lovely area with great schools.