How much is your mortgage in relation to salary?

[wildflower93]

No-one talks openly, honestly and transparently about money so I thought I’d ask strangers on the internet.
How much is your mortgage in relation to your take home salary?

I just thought it would be important to get a range of anecdotal opinions.

I’m currently looking at buying our forever home. We were looking in the region of 400-450k. However the interest rates have suddenly hiked the monthly payments to over £1700 a month from the £1380
we were expecting.

We are planning to cut the absolutely maximum monthly payments to £1380 which would be a £380k house.

My partner and I bring home £6200 combined after pension, student loan repayments etc. it will rise to £6550 in September when I’m back at work full time. For reference- this will be a combined income of around £110,000.

Our house has sold and we have £97k equity. We have no savings (maybe £1000) as we’ve had a lot of work done to the house over the last few years- and have spent the remaining few thousands of our savings getting it ready to sell. We are looking to have 10k left ish once all is completed.

Our mortgage is currently £700 ( 3 bed semi - North West)

DS is 3- childcare costs are £19 a month as he’s now in preschool.

We have 17 months left on a loan we pay £250 a month for (new roof).

Is a 390k house doable or am I insane?

You’re completley right.

We have one cheap ten year old car.

We have had our offer accepted and will be borrowing 320k from the bank for our 385,000 purchase.

In September we will be on a combined income of 120,000. I’m not sure what this looks like in monthly pay yet but our mortgage will be under 25% of our income after tax so I think we’re pretty comfortable.

We will also have a buffer of 15k after the sale so will put 10k immediately into savings and spend 5k on a few new bits for the house.

We live within our means but our child is spoilt rotten and we love to eat out. This is something we will really have to nip in the bud

We also have one child but I want two more and would love to foster in the future (currently a secondary school teacher with a very big heart!)

Starting my mortgage in Aug, £1550, bring home around 4.3k, though will drop a bit when I move to a national salary from London, though my expenses will drop accordingly. I am planning on doing some side hustles with a view to overpaying mortgage as i’m 49 and just starting a mortgage due to having to wait until youngest was 18 before relocating to buy (didn’t want to buy a flat).

Yep have to agree with this - our mortgage is 40% of our household income, but we are fairly high earners so that still leaves us plenty of money to spend on bills, living expenses and a decent buffer to save. Would be much tighter if we were paying 40% of an “average” household income on the mortgage alone.

Take home 6200 mortgage 1350. About to drop £100 but keeping paying the same to cut a couple of years off the end.
I compare it to rent, neighbours pay £2500 and I think it’s very reasonable and we’ll own outright by retirement.

Honestly if they are young enough to get a 35 year term without going past retirement age, it probably does make financial sense to get the “forever” home now, rather than moving into a medium house in their early 30s and then moving again to the forever house in their 40s.

We didn’t, we had the same flat from age 22 to 45, then moved to what is probably the forever home. If we had moved 10 years ago the house would have been about 1/2 the price, and we could have completed all the renovations etc by now (necessary things like replacing leaking windows, stained carpets and 30 year old bathrooms, not cosmetic fluff) and probably paid off most of the mortgage. We’d have saved on stamp duty etc as well.

Ours is just over 1/3 of our income after tax. It’s our forever home so we stretched ourselves to afford it, money is quite tight at the moment as we’re also paying childcare fees but it’s never manageable when we don’t. I wouldn’t want to be paying much more.

Yeah, it's not something I'd do myself because I simply don't want to spend that much on property. But the fact is that multiple house moves are an expense and faff that needs to be factored in too, for people who'd likely make them.

If you know you want a particular type of property, you can't afford it on a 25 year mortgage but you can afford it on a 35 year one, it might make more sense for your circumstances to choose the 35 year rather than the more traditional upgrading a couple of times and banking on the ladder still working as you hope.

All of this.

I’m horrified by the figures I’m reading on here and people admitting they’ve stretched themselves to the max. All it takes is one unplanned, expensive, event to screw things up.

There was a thread on here the other day, someone unable to work due to cancer, so not able to pay the interest and the bank we’re going to repossess.

For those of you stretching yourself, do you at least have separate mortgage repayment’s insurance? I’ve been able to claim that a couple of times over the last 20 years, despite still getting full company sickness pay for several months. It has been well worth having and, if I’d been jobless, would have kept us going.

14% of take home pay. Single parent to one DD. I have chosen to stay in a flat rather than stretch myself as I’d rather know I can afford the mortgage if my circumstances change.