Financial buffer for buying a house

[Sengah]

I'm interested to hear what the norm is for buying a house and how much of a buffer people keep back to cover unknowns. Friends seem to have a wide range of responses to this, from using a credit card to meet the last couple of £k on their house purchase 😱 To insisting it is crazy not to move with a year's worth of mortgage payments saved.

What did you do?

Crazy not to move without

I am laughing at the thought of having saved a years worth of mortgage payments before moving! That would be 18k for us. It just wouldn’t be doable.
I’m just about to buy a place with my DP and we’ll only have a buffer of about 5k or so between us once we exchange.
I find that a bit scary and will carry on saving for a few months until I’ve got about 5k in my personal savings.

We have a massive buffer but I think we are in the minority . Most people I know are maxxed out!! 🙈

when we moved into our new house a year ago we had just 8k to our joints names and yes, that was very scary.

We were completely wiped out when we bought our first house. Had no savings left at all.

Buffer of £10k always.

Most FTBs do it by the seat of their pants. Especially in this climate. As long as there is scope in your mortgage-paying budget to rebuild savings, you often have to be brave.

The first month after buying our house we had £0. But we knew our mortgage payments were reasonable and we would be able to start saving again from our next pay packets.

So how many months do those amounts translate to? What is a good safety net to have?

We had about 3000 left

About 2 months of mortgage payments!

We had about £5000. However we’re adding to our savings again now we’ve moved.
And we’ve got mortgage insurance.

We will have a grand total of £400 left after completion.
But we do then hope to get our £800 deposit back, not thousands though mind you.

We've had to scrape every penny together to pay nearly £20,000.

I could have as little as £2k left after buying STBXH out of our house. I won't have to move admittedly but there are things need doing.

We paid off overdrafts before getting mortgage but no savings.
Also now living back in the overdraft

8 k translates to about 3 months mortgage and bills if we eat cheaply.

it depends on what you want safety net for - are you talking about if one of you is made redundant or money for replacing a boiler or roof in new house?

No debt, no savings here. After the £20k plus for a tiny deposit & fees, we needed the rest to actually furnish the place

We will have nothing the deposit survey/ solicitors/ broker etc we might have kept the money we saved enough the changes to stamp duty but we put it towards the deposit.

We completed 48 hours before the stamp duty changes came in. Would have saved us 5.5k...

Less money for boiler/roof, more for job loss and covering mortgage payments if that happened - til we found work again. Sorry chienrouge that is rough.

Depends on your income I think. If you earn a decent amount you can pay things by cc, go frugal for a month and still be able to pay back on time. If you are struggling to cover monthly expenses, anything cropping up could really set you back.

The 5k I’d like to have in my own savings would comfortably cover three months living costs.
I think it’s sensible to aim to have at least that in the bank.

Self employed here
Mortgage up as far as possible
Have 4 months mortgage payments in savings ( by the skin of our teeth )
Thank the lord every month after the mortgage payment goes out

I relied on the credit card when buying my first place. But it was a new built show flat and I got to keep the furniture and decorations + it had the 10y warranty. I knew I'd rent the spare bedroom straight away and quickly build savings + my job was very secure so I just went for it.

Any subsequent purchases needed doing up and I always had enough to do the work + other savings/investments. I'm generally risk averse so I've never borrowed anywhere near what the bank would lend except for that first property.