10% deposit on exchange - help!

[badgermonkey]

We are currently selling our house and buying another. Everyone in the chain wants to move fast so I don't want to start putting doubts in anyone's mind by asking stupid questions more than I have to.

We got our initial purchase paperwork from the solicitor and in there it asked about how we were going to pay the 10% deposit on exchange. Well, I don't know!

We are selling our house for £120000, porting a mortgage of £85000 and taking out another mortgage of £65000. This gives us a total mortgage of £150000 on a £170000 house (we are taking out £15000 of the equity to pay for fees and work needed on the new house). This has all been agreed in principle and is affordable etc. But we don't have any cash now - the £20000 deposit is dependent on the money from selling this place! So what do we do?

Your solicitor needs to coordinate exchange on house you are selling with exchange on house you are buying.

The solicitor can roll on the deposit from your buyer as you exchange up the chain.

So we can use our seller's deposit? Why didn't they just bloody say that, then! I couldn't for the life of me work out what was supposed to happen.

Basically provided you are in a chain then you can use your buyers deposit as security on your purchase etc. I think if you need more than this then you can get some sort of bridging loan from the mortgage company or early release of some funds or something. But don't worry about having to sort this yourself - just talk to your solicitor and they can advise - they do this all the time as most of the time people are reliant on their buyer's deposit and their mortgage for the money and don't have any spare cash lying around. I don't even remember how we did this with our house, but we cetrainly didn't have to find extra cash for the deposit

Our buyer is 50% cash, so she will definitely have enough deposit to pass up.

I didn't want to ask the solicitor until I had some idea what I was talking about!