Mortgage affordability?

[Potaytoe5]

What % of your income is it ok to spend on the mortgage?
Currently on £70k joint income but low spending (fully owned car, no childcare costs).
About £190k equity in our current house. Thinking about moving to a house worth about £350k, which would mean having a mortgage of £160k.
Is that a safe amount? Are there any good ways to calculate it?
Our current jobs are secure / in demand.

160k is far less than 2.5 times your household income, so I'd imagine it would be pretty affordable. Borrowing 4-5x your income is quite normal.

Sounds pretty affordable to me. Ours works out about 27% which is comfortable for our salaries.

Difficulty with % is that a high earner could easily afford a higher % of housing costs, as 30% of disposable income from them would be much more than 30% disposable income for a worker on NMW for example.

It's probably easier for you to just set out a budget and get a picture of if you feel comfortable with what you have left in a month.

It also depends how much disposable income you want/need…so if you have £1k of ‘free spends’ a month and this would increase your mortgage £500 then that’s very different from if you only had ‘free spends’ of £600 a month…

We are on way less than you and took on a 190k mortgage 2 years ago. You are worrying over nothing IMO.

Sorry we are still in our first house so a bit clueless. It looks a bit scary as our last mortgage rate was little over 2%.
We're on £70k BEFORE tax, to be precise. DH was looking at houses worth £400k but I would be slightly worried with the disposable income / what if one of us gets ill etc. Will have a closer look at our spendings.

I think you need to look at actual monthly payments and see what they come out as with current rates.

Would a new mortgage be taken out over 25 years or less (not knowing your age)? Would you have the legal fees + stamp duty cost + estate agent fee available separately / in savings or does this come out of your current equity?

If you're looking at a 25 years term and ALL 190k go towards new house rates appear to be around £830 a month currently for a 5 years fix.

Our new mortgage payments are almost twice this 😭but we earn a combined income of around £115k+ and it is doable, so I'd imagine you'll be fine but not knowing all details it's hard to say.

To put your worries into perspective, we have a mortgage of £150k and income of around £64k. We could have borrowed way more thank that, but this amount is definitely comfortable for us. It really comes down to what your mortgage payments will be compared to net income. And then what other costs you have. We have no childcare costs which is often a big one.

I’d think more about the monthly payments rather than the total borrowing. Our monthly mortgage payments are 29% of our take home pay.