Do most people who buy a 300k+ house...

[PinkTriangle]

Have a hefty deposit (possibly from making a profit on a previous house sale?) in order to afford mortgage payments?....

Or are can you tell me your secret? What is your line of work?

Our budget is £200k, we only have a£20 deposit ( from our last mortgage, we made a loss in the sale but had paid of about a 1/3 of mortgage). We have okay paying jobs (£25k each) but we're so not looking forward to paying £1000 in mortgage each month. It makes me wonder how others do it :/

[WasabiPeace]

£500k house, £300k mortgage, £120k equity, £100k government loan (20k went on fees).

Third house though.

[PinkTriangle]

Mostly, I guess that's also how many people do it now, buy as a singleton, couple up and sell 2 houses to buy 1

[LondonGirl83]

Live in London and our first flat was 315k. My husband is in the civil service and I work in finance. At the time our combined incomes would hav been around 115k. We used equity created in the flat and savings to buy our house which was much more extensive. Our salaries also increased significantly in the interim.

Friends of ours, one a travel agent the other in market research earn a combined salary of circa 100k. The recently bought their first house for around 300k. They worked hard to save a 10% deposit. Their mortgage is about 2.7x their earnings so not to bad.

Another friend just bought a flat in London for 320k as her first home. She makes around 90k. She used help to buy as she only had a 5% mortgage. She works in project management / IT for a major bank.

[WhatsGoingOnEh]

My mortgage is £780 a month, on a mortgage of £141k. Reading the thread has made me feel I'm paying too much!

[CreamSubstitute]

Bought our first house which was over £300k with a £200k deposit. It was a combo of inheritance, years of savings and some family assistance. Oh and a large mortgage - which still worked out lower than the rent we'd been paying.

[PinkTriangle]

Looks like a lot is down to luck!

[IsabellaofFrance]

We are moving next week to a house which has cost £325,000. Its our third house, have paid £150,000 deposit (equity after paying off most of our mortgage on the house we are selling).

[TwoLittleTerrors]

methe problem is rent is about the same as £1k. Our neighbour which is a terraced house rents at just under £1k. We are in a 3 bed semi. A work colleague of DH rents a family home at £1.2k. So £1100 isn't actually much.

As you can see from the house prices I mentioned, my house is around £250k. So paying £1k per month mortgage on it actually isn't excessive given that's the rental value. However we actually paid a lot less given the low mortgage rates. We managed to pay it off now but that's with redundancy money.

[Blackeyez09]

Im also paying 699 for 138K mortgage but used the help to buy probably could have saved harder and longer but only thought about not paying landlords mortgage recently and previously enjoyed treats and things

I earn circa 52K bought alone my next house will be a forever type hopefully with my dp who is currently studying but should be back at work on a similar salary when he finishes. We also expect our salaries to increase by quite a bit when we finish training.

[ClashCityRocker]

Dh bought this house in his own for around 40k in mid nineties. It's now worth 170k, and we will be mortgage free within the next two years.

We are torn between staying put and being mortgage free, or taking on another mortgage to get somewhere bigger. Current house is sufficient, but not great space wise, although excellent location, joint earnings around 60k per annum, mine likely to rise, DH's probably will only rise in line with inflation.

The thought of being mortgage free is very enticing - it will probably mean earlier retirement for dh and give scope for me to reduce hours compared to taking on a bigger mortgage. But then again, the thought of staying in a house that's 'sufficient' rather than one that we love is a bit depressing. Current house has no space for having guests and the garden is tiny.

[PinkTriangle]

Clashcity I think many people we know are in your position..... We always wonder whether we should have stayed put in our last tiny house not big enough for our 2 kids but had a small mortgage. But looking back it was way too small so we have opted for a larger mortgage in the hope that I'll be earning more in 3 years time!

[HaplessHousewife]

I think the thing is, that the higher equity to value ratio you have the better the rate they give you. We pay about £1200 for a 300k mortgage.

We bought in 2002, 175k house and put down 37k, we benefitted massively from the rocketing house prices and from buying a house that needed everything doing to it. We'd previously lived (separately) at home rent free for five years to save up for a deposit but only earned 42k between us when we bought.

By 2011 we'd paid off the mortgage and sold the house for 335k.

[ktd2u]

How we did it - bought house in 2011 - it was our first house and we had about £20k deposit. Sold it in 2014 and then had £45k deposit. Bought next house for £415k - so we had just over 10% deposit, took out mortgage for 25 years with nationwide... BUT... Could only do it because we got stamp duty paid and we did help to buy. Otherwise budget would've been £300k. Got a 5 year fixed rate and now will overpay as much as possible to enable us to absorb the help to buy part. With mortgage rate so low it makes sense to overpay than put everything in savings. I'm now 30 with a house we'd happily stay in and raise our family. Hope all works out x

[Pigleychez]

We recently bought this house (360K) but its house number 5 for us! We worked our way up the ladder. The first in 2000 was a rented flat, Then a (shitty)maisonette that we did up alot. We made 40k on it. Then onto a two bed terrace. Then 3 bed Semi (made 60K) onto our current house (4 bed detached) where we plan to be for many years. Although we made profit I guess alot depends on the housing market at the time too.
We are both mid 30's. I'm a SAHM but DH earns quite highly.
We are lucky.

[Chchchchanging]

We worked our way up ladder buying rough and turning into diamonds thus in amoungst all the fees making a few quid each time

[PinkTriangle]

We are unlucky :/

[Viviennemary]

Younger people do seem to be going for astronomically huge mortgages. Even some first time buyers. Usually on fairly good salaries though. But it will be a strain with maternity leave and if interest rates go up.

[IfYouWereARiverIdLearnToFloat]

We both bought in 2007 at height of market so were only able to break even when we sold up 2 years ago.

Had scraped together a deposit for a house but decided not to overstretch ourselves at this point. Our mortgage is only one and a half times our salaries so plan is to overpay as much as possible and we're on track to have £100-150k deposit for the £300k house in the next 5 years. More if house prices rise. We've been screwed by the recession but incredibly lucky to be able to dig ourselves back out again

[plus3]

Ok ... We have just bought our first home at >£300k with a £50k deposit. It is a fixer upper - done houses are all closer to £400k

We have a large mortgage £1400 per month for 25yrs but it beats renting. mat leave done, I work P/T on quite good money DH F/T on much better.
It is doable

[plus3]

And we got completely screwed over during the huge price rise in 2000.... This house has been a long time coming

[Artandco]

We rent in London. Our 1 bed flat costs us £1650 rent a month. We can get a £350k mortgage and pay £1300 a month. So still cheaper than renting

( not like you can buy much in central London for £350k)

[LizzieMint]

We've just offered on a house in that bracket and our deposit is around 60%. But this will be my 5th house, 20 years after buying my first one, so have just gone a bit up the ladder each time. The first house was on a 100% mortgage back when they still did those.

[PinkTriangle]

Artanco.... I was reading the other day that people in London can afford the mortgage as they're ust paying similar in rent, it's just getting a deposit together is the hard bit due to not being able to save because of high rent prices :/... Catch 22!

[MrsSparkles]

We bought our first property in London for £375k in 2007. Made possible by good joint income - around £110k, and 10% deposit we saved really hard for. Plus some help from parents - we didn't need it but it bought our interest rate down.

Now moved to a £450k house with huge deposit from equity in previous property from combination of overpaying and increase in property prices.

V v hard time for first time buyers.

[munchkin2902]

Bought a flat three years ago for 240k and selling for 400k, hoping to buy for 550k if we ever bloody exchange we earn just over 130k between us now but still no way we could afford so much without a hefty deposit from prices going up.bur prices have gone up where we're buying too so it's Monopoly money really.