Mortgage - percentage of income and maternity leave?

[Emslifechoices]

What percentage of your monthly income (net) do you spend on your mortgage?

Most people don't sent their children to private school though.

I was responding the post before mine in which the poster mentioned school fees explicitly. For most, the primary cost is in the early years and relates to child care (childminder, nursery etc) but this period 7 to 8 years for many families with a more than one child.

Most people don't earn anywhere near enough to contemplate 60% of their income being devoted to their mortgage if they have children regardless of if they are state or privately educated, which was kind of my point.

That's certainly true. But it is more sensible to think in terms of how much actual income you have left after mortgage (and childcare) rather than a percentage. If you've only got £500 a month left for bills, food, everything else, then you've got a problem, regardless what percentage your mortgage is of your income.

Actually our school fees are no more than the nursery fees quoted here but yes point taken. My post was just to illustrate that you can't just look at percentages since what one person might have as fifty percent will be dramatically different from what another has.

Yes, which is what I said in my very first post.

Lifestyle, financial goals, child care costs, total earnings etc all come into play when considering what you can afford as a mortgage.

However, in reality it doesn't vary that much within the population. For 95% of people with young children, 40% of your income going to your mortgage will be far in excess of what is prudent / feasible.

That's all.

I agree % thing is fairly useless, we will be taking on bigger mortgage in a year and at that point our mortgage plus childcare will be about 50% of our income. Within 3 years with all the kids at school this will drop to about 33% of combined income. Plus our new house will be cheaper to run ( new house, ground source heat pump and solar panels which will actually earn us a few thousand a year in RHI payment) so again it's not a great way to work out affordability.
Our combined income is a bit above average and we don't live in London so childcare much cheaper!

If you want to work out affordability it's worth filling in a budget planner like the one on money saving expert to see whether you'll be in the red or black at the end of each month

Our mortgage is currently about 15% of our combined income. DH wants to move to a much bigger detached house though, which would take our mortgage to about 30%. We have any particularly significant childcare costs (about 2% of our income at most) or commuting costs or any of that malarkey really.

We still had nursery costs when we bought this house and that did factor in to our decision making. However we were super conservative about it all and didn't really factor in the dramatic plummeting of childcare costs once DS2 started school. In fact, the new mortgage (if we decide to do this) would be similar to what we were paying for mortgage and childcare combined. Or the same as our rent and childcare were for several years before we bought (and we still managed to save up enough for a deposit as well).

We have quite a high income though, particularly since we do not live in London* (or anywhere notably expensive). Not that housing in the nice areas around here is spectacularly cheap. You can't pick up a house where we are for £50k (despite what people seem to imagine about the north).

*well, it's high in comparison to the local average.