After paying all of your Mortgage/rent, bills etc....

[Scoobydooooo]

We are trying to make a big discion about if we should get a mortgage or now, i wanted to ask some questions, don't answer if they are to personal or even change your name just looking to see what others live on etc...

After paying everything like mortgage,council tax, bills, petrol, food, what sort of money do you have left over as extra cash?

Would you pay £1000 on your mortgage & council tax if your income was £2000 per month?

Think thats it for now....

not alot

yes if a better area/ better schools etc.

By the way the £2000 per month is basic without bonuses & working every other saturday this would add as extra...

We would be left with about £470.00 after adding the saturdays, this is after paying out everything apart from buying clothes.

Would you do it?

Not much, less than £50 per week, for hols, clothes, birthdays etc. we pay £750 for mortgage and ctax and our income is approx. £1700 net per month. So pretty similar. At least you get a house at the end of 25yrs! But don't forget the hidden extras of owning a home like buildings insurance, life insurance and any others like repairs plumbing insurance etc. We pay about £60 per month for these.

just mortgage and council tax leaves you 1K

(we have an additional 4 or 500 quid a month going on things we consider fixed costs like water, gas, electricity, insurance, phones, broadband)

that's before we get to variable costs like food, entertainment etc

So £1000 would have to cover all your other bills apart from mortgage and council tax, plus food, petrol and everything else?

Sounds tight to me.

Yes all our toher bills come to £731.00 this includes all food, petrol everything each month. The £2000 is off dp's basic wage from monday to friday he aslo does 2 saturdays a month but we have not added this wage & also does other work but we wanted to go by the total basic.

So that leaves you £270? But you might have extras to add on top? £270 is not much to live on for a whole month.

although you've covered food and petrol.

hmmm. well it depends how good you are at budgeting and frugal you can be!

Yes thats right working off the basic, but that is like extra cash because we would have paid for everything do you see what i mean?

But if we added dp's saturday work we would have about £470 left over per month after everything

Yes.

I don't know the answer - it's a personal thing whether or not £270 a month extra is enough for you or not. Depends on your lifestyle and how good you are at saving!

do you want a budget planner there's a good one on martin lewis' site I can find if you want

Yes please twiglett, i think i have actually done it before but i will have another go now to work it all out

I have worked it all out on paper but a budget planner may be better, thanks.

look at bottom of left-hand side under money saving tools

Or even £470 a month.

We were saving up for something, last year or the year before I think, and started to budget £100 per week for extras (so not food or petrol). Some weeks we managed it and some weeks we were way over. We struggled to stick to it but I can't remember why now as it was too long ago and we don't budget like that anymore.

I'm sure it can be done - if that's all you have then that's all you can spend isn't it!

What you have to think about is how you would address a big, unexpected bill for something. Like if you needed a set of new tyres for the car or something like that. D'you know what I mean? If you are living 'hand to mouth' like that - where do you go if you need a few hundred for something?

I know exactly what you mean Gdg it quite a hard thing to decide on, the only way we could bring it down is to do interest only for the 1st 1-2 years but we don't want to do that...

I would, but only if you see your circumstances improving in some way so that you anticipate being able to 'up' payments.

We have HAD to do interest only for 1st two years as it was the only way to get on the ladder at last.
We moved in and took out all insurances poss.Its a good job we did as suddenely got a leak and called relevnt people and discovered we needed a hole new immursion tank costing £1,000!!! Luckily we were covered.We also needed some new parts in the boiler.There are too many hidden costs.We have no savings so are risking things but yeah if you want to get on the ladder before it really does become unachievable then you need to take a few risks.