First time buyer advice please!

[rubydoobydoo]

Hi
After years of throwing our money away into rental properties, we have finally managed to scrape together enough of a deposit to get onto the property ladder!

The thing is, we don't really know where to start - apart from excitedly browsing through property websites!

What sort of upfront costs are we looking at? ( buying something around the value of 100,000 - 110,000) I know we need to pay a solicitor, what about upfront costs to get the mortgage etc? Is it worth getting a mortgage broker?

And if any advice about anything else it will be very gratefully received and taken on board. Thanks in advance!

We bought our house 5 years ago for £100,000. Don't know if everything is the same now but one house fell through and even considering that we spent about £4k on fees and searches

Solicitors fees - Approx 1.2k (includes most common disbursements)

Valuation/Survey: £229 - £700

Mortgage application free: £0 - £2500 (dependent on product)

Removals: Depends on size of house but we are paying £1512 for a 3 bed - 4

Then you have the cost of any furniture/soft furnishings/appliances you need.

I didn't get a mortgage advisor, but I am a mortgage underwriter by trade and knew the best deal for me. If you do want to see one I can recommend London & County or John Charcol. Both are very good.

-Please note I do NOT work and have never worked for either-

I've never had a mortgage broker, you just need to go through the newspapers e.g. Guardian Money on a Sat and see what the best deals are OR go for security and pick a few of the big names like Nationwide,Halifax and go to their websites and see what they've got on offer. It takes an afternoon but that's it. Get a mortgage offer and a sense of your deposit before you make an offer, as it gives you leverage (we're currently selling to FTBs in this position and it definitely made us accept their offer). Once you've found somewhere you like instruct a solicitor (you can find advice on getting a solicitor for this on directgov).

Our upfront costs were less than £600 pounds in total just the cost of solicitor and a days van hire. No mortgage fee, survey cost added to mortgage, we were only moving round the corner so hired a van and moved ourselves.

It's worth talking to a mortgage broker, but bear in mind they are not completely independent and will only put you on to mortgages with companies that reward them in some way. I'm in the process of buying my first house; the estate agent gave me the number of the mortgage advisor who arranged her own mortgage and I did talk to him (it was free so I figured why not) but I found a better deal myself online, one he hadn't even heard of (even though I only used a price comparison website, Moneysupermarket I think) (it was a special deal for graduates). It is a tracker mortgage though and some people wouldn't feel comfortable with that (but with interest rates very low it's a good time to have a tracker mortgage; we are not tied into it and can always switch to a fixed rate in the future).

We've spent about £600 so far and as far as I know only have stamp duty left to pay (1% of the price of the property). We will get friends and family to help us on moving day.

Thanks - we'll be moving ourselves,DP can borrow the van from work and his dad has a trailer so that's one less cost!
I've got quotes from a couple of local solicitors and it looks like we'll be looking at around £600 - I suppose we just don't want any nasty surprises or thing we haven't even thought about!

We're going to start mortgage shopping next week, I'm a member of a union and they offer some sort of service so i'll give them a call.

I'm just a little bit excited!