Families face 75pc cut in mortgage borrowing limit

[ElenorRigby]

Parents penalised as mortgage lenders take the cost of bringing up children into account

Banks can't win really. They lend loads to everyone, they caused the sub prime fiasco, got roundly slagged off by everyone (quite reasonably). Now they try to tighten up the criteria and only lend what people can afford to pay back...they're still bad.

If you have a child you have lots more expense than if you don't. So you should be able to borrow less, that's fair surely?

I can see why they are doing it although I hope they are true to their word and look at it case by case. We are in the middle of buying our first house and the bank looked at our number of children but also at the fact that we pay 2.5X what the mortgage repayments would be in rent and have never missed payments etc. It would be a little silly to suggest that we cant afford mortgage when we easily afford our rent even with the 5 dcs.

Hmmm. Does this look like house prices will come down again then?

Parent's are not being penalised at all. Banks are looking at all regular expenditure before deciding on how much they are willing to lend.

Using the same logic, the headline could equally be: "Car drivers penalised as mortgage lenders take the cost of car ownership into account"

Kids cost money.

They took into account our childcare costs when we remortgaged last year - it's an expense. Same for other costs like having a car, food, going out, holidays etc.

I didn't think they were focussing on us having children.

I also wondered why the bank didn't ask for this much detail when we took out our first mortgage!

Of course banks have to take people's circumstances into consideration. But some people manage mortgage payments and other people on the same salary don't manage them. I know people who have struggled and cut back to the bare bones to afford their mortgage. And this isn't taken into consideration.

Our bank went over our expenditure with a fine tooth comb.

Including childcare/private health insurance/school fees/holiday expenses everything.

My kids will probably cost us over a $1,000,000 to get to 18 if we take into account not only the expense of having them but also my 'lost' earnings/effect on DH's career etc.

That is the way it goes. We decided that having them was better than having more cash.