how many times your income were you lent for your mortgage?

[sparklemagic]

just wondering! I'm wondering about people who have fairly recently got a mortgage, or who know something about what's on offer nowadays - DH and I are looking to buy a house soon; we have a good deposit but in order to get any sort of house we will need over four and a half times our joint income - is this likely?

I know that as houses have gone up in price people have started talking about offering mortgages on 'affordability' rather than strictly 3x joint or whatever - is this really on offer?

thanks!

The reason multiples of income was always used to calculate mortages is that the banks believe that you need 2/3's of your income to live on.
So many people have borrowed too much and a 1% interest rate rise will lead to the housing market being flooded with properties.
If you can sit back and wait the fun is about to start !

same as toothache - mine was 3.5 my single salary, mortgage taken out last autumn. I've been throwing every spare penny at it and it will be 3 times my salary later this year. I will be comfortable when it is 2x my salary - that to me is the point it becomes reasonable.

But it depends what 2/3 of your income is! If you bring home £6000 a month you can easily live on less than £4000 of it if you want to thereby being able to afford a bigger mortgage, if that is what you want to spend your money on.

I think 'the fun' is over and I don't believe there'll be a crash personally.

gdc, in agreement - also think a 'crash' as such is unlikely in most parts of the country. Also the income your using as the basis for the loan is so impotant. we took a mortgage when we were newly married of 3.8ish times dh's income - we just couldn't afford to live!!! really - i think Dh earnt about 16K at the time. After bills we had 25squid a week for entertainment, clothes for two kids, car repairs etc. I remember it as a thourouhgly miserable time - and I'm sure its no coincidence that my marriage nearly ended then.
I would really do your sums carefully and check you feel you can afford it - even if the bank are prepared to leet you have the cash. We thought the bank saying ok meant it would be ok !

We got just over 4x DPs wages, but this was because we bought the house at a lot less than market value. This was from Bristol & West.

gazillions

in the days when self cert mortgages were easy to come by

Oh and ours was a self cert, otherwise the max we could get left us £40K short of a house.

(this was in apr 03) - ours was if youre single you get 4 times your income, if youre a couple you get 3 times your income...im with Northern Rock.

The loan to value ratio is also important isn't it? If you borrow way over your heads and you have no equity - that's a dangerous situation. If you've equity, if it came to the worst you could always move.

thanks for all the responses everyone - it does reassure me that there seems to be lots of stuff out there based on affordability.

If we went on 2 or 3 times our income we wouldn't even be able to afford a one bed flat round here - how ridiculous is that!!!!