Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Property/DIY

Join our Property forum for renovation, DIY, and house selling advice.

Original poster

Taking on a massive mortgage

69 replies

purpleplucker · 31/12/2023 14:17

It’s so scary. Will we regret it? Do you regret it?

Future earning potential looks good, but what if we suddenly hate our work? Taking on a 30 year mortgage with payment of £5,000 a month is so much.

OP posts:
stillavid · 31/12/2023 14:18

Well it sounds a very large mortgage but I you earn £50k a month, not so much.

Original poster
purpleplucker · 31/12/2023 14:22

Sadly we don’t earn 50k a month, but there’s probably a 1/10 chance that one of us will end up earning that much.

OP posts:
Shinyandnew1 · 31/12/2023 14:22

That does sound a lot, but it depends on a few things really.

Like…what are your salaries? Do you or will you have kids? Will you want to go part time? Will you have to pay for full time childcare? How old are you both?

what if we suddenly hate our work?

What do you do? Is that likely? If you work for the NHS or within education, I’d say this was increasingly likely, unfortunately.

Original poster
purpleplucker · 31/12/2023 14:23

We are both lawyers. Currently our combined pre tax is around £250k before bonuses, likely to go up every year we stay in the profession.

OP posts:
TokyoSushi · 31/12/2023 14:24

£5K per month sounds absolutely massive, to probably almost everyone, but it depends entirely on your financial situation/what you earn/what job you do, etc etc etc

3luckystars · 31/12/2023 14:27

Is it your first home?

It’s a huge leap alright.

MrsSamR · 31/12/2023 14:28

My husband and I have a combined salary of around £180k before tax and bonuses and our mortgage is around £1k a month as we chose to prioritise private school for our 2 kids. £5k a month sounds massive even for 2 very good salaries and is a big commitment when you have no idea what may happen in the future. Do you have/want kids? Assuming you're based in London with a mortgage and salaries like that?

Shinyandnew1 · 31/12/2023 14:29

purpleplucker · 31/12/2023 14:23

We are both lawyers. Currently our combined pre tax is around £250k before bonuses, likely to go up every year we stay in the profession.

Do you both want to work full time and progress seriously in your careers and would this change if you had kids? The very ambitious lawyer friends I had from university didn’t want to combine that fast-paced work life with babies and never went back after maternity leave.

Original poster
purpleplucker · 31/12/2023 14:29

Yes first home. The reason we’re looking at such an expensive property is that we want to skip straight to something we’d be happy in for 10+ years. This is because stamp duty is so painfully high on London/expensive properties

OP posts:
Pinkdelight3 · 31/12/2023 14:30

5K a month is terrifying! But you must be getting your money's worth and could've gone for something more modest if you were all that concerned.

NewyearNewyear2024 · 31/12/2023 14:30

I wouldn’t. But I see things differently after divorce and redundancy from a well-paid job.

ohdamnitjanet · 31/12/2023 14:33

If I earned 20k a month doubt I’d blink at a 5k mortgage.

FIuffy · 31/12/2023 14:35

My deciding factor here would be loan to value.

So say you’re buying a £1m property with £250k deposit and a £750k mortgage, if things go belly-up you’ll have equity that you can walk away with and use towards a less expensive property.

However, if it’s a £1m property with £50k deposit and £950k, you run a big risk of getting into negative equity and being stuck.

(My current mortgage is £5,404 but there’s a very short term remaining and a lot of equity so comfortable with that).

MrsSamR · 31/12/2023 14:44

Very good point here re LTV.

adultsizedogbed · 31/12/2023 14:46

What's your actual take home ? My dh earns that alone so I guess take home for two is a lot more .

We don't have a mortgage now and a £1m house but have worked our way up to that..

Having said that our first house was a 2 bed and our mortgage was £1200 compared to a £25k salary 27 years ago so probably not much difference

You can always sell it if it's too much 🤷‍♀️

Notellinganyone · 31/12/2023 14:52

My DH and I earn over 50k and that’s only 6K take home per month, 5k is huge.

whenindoubtgotothelibrary · 31/12/2023 14:58

Sounds OK to me on your salary, prospects and stage of life. You must be bringing home at around £11-12k a month between you, even before bonuses. MN advice is often that you must never borrow more than four pence ha'penny, but unfortunately that is not usually the reality if you want to buy a house in London. We had to do something similar to get the house we wanted. We went interest only for a while and made lump sum cash payments to get the capital down at times that suited us (e.g bonuses) so that we could plan in paying school fees etc. It was fine, even with mat leaves and a career break along the way.

FlabMonsterIsDietingAgain · 31/12/2023 15:06

You really need to think through what other costs you are likely to have.

If you are buying this house with the idea of having children, can you afford £5k a month with one of you on maternity/paternity leave for a year?

Can you afford £1.5k a month nursery fees for 3-4 years?

If you were to decide that you didn't want to put your child into full time nursery or if for some reason it wasn't possible, could you afford it with one of you on part time wages?

TheWillowTrees · 31/12/2023 15:12

Do you plan to have children? Will your sums still work with the cost of a nanny doing extended hours (you may be looking at £60-70k for someone live out to get the flexibility you’ll need? Also think about school fees down the line. Is there any chance you’ll want to rethink your working practices- eg one of you going 4 days or moving in house?

Fellow lawyer here- things to think about in career terms are-
—do you have realistic prospects of partnership, not just based on your own abilities but on the path ahead of you - no bottleneck of senior associates? How would you feel about moving firms? City firms can be “up or out”.
-I know that during busy times it’s hard to imagine firms making people redundant but it does happen. Worth thinking about what you’d do. Ideally you’ll be at different firms and one of you in something counter-cyclical like insolvency 😉

dealandse · 31/12/2023 15:17

Our mortgage is a similar amount but our joint income is higher, although we are older so there's less scope for our salaries to increase. I'd say that if you're quite early in your careers and in certain areas of law then it's not a huge risk.

For us we only took on so much as we have another property which we've now sold, so we'll be able to pay off a large amount once the fixed rate is over and our payments will drop substantially.

Our previous home was a large flat but we were very cramped by the time we moved. We wouldn't have been able to get such a large mortgage when we first moved there but if we'd been able to, it would have been much better - to be settled in one place, one lot of stamp duty and fees, to go straight to a house and not deal with leasehold issues, and psychologically just to be in our home and feel like any work we did on it was an investment for the time we lived there. A larger property would certainly have increased in value more than our flat did.

Hairyfairy01 · 31/12/2023 15:26

Are you planning to have kids? How stable are your jobs? What about if interest rates rise? It sounds an awful lot to me but then again my income is nowhere near yours. Maybe the fact you are doubting it is telling you what you need to know?

LindaDawn · 31/12/2023 16:07

I would go for it if you have done all the sums and you can afford it. Moving house is so expensive but incredibly frustrating, Time consuming and stressful!

Scarletttulips · 31/12/2023 16:11

It’s isn’t a 30 year morgage because you can downsize at any time, trade up, you can sell it and see the world. You can over pay and be clear earlier. You can change jobs etc -

Think about short term. Can you afford it /can you afford it on one wage? - have you found a house you like -

Grinchinlaws · 31/12/2023 16:20

Sounds fine to me tbh. You’ve obviously passed affordability checks.

Realistically it will be impossible
for you both to sustain those careers if you have kids unless you fork out serious money for a nanny (c.£50k pa, paid out of your post tax salary) so you should think about that and assume you’ll either be paying that or one or both of you will be stepping down at work.

Im a lawyer (though DH isn’t) and our mortgage is about half of that because I didn’t want the stress. We could afford a much bigger house and perhaps will make the move someday but I like where we live.

blueshoes · 31/12/2023 16:29

Future earning potential looks good, but what if we suddenly hate our work?

I assume you are both City lawyers. If so, there is a good chance at least one of you will hate your work (or the unpredictable hours and demanding clients and business development) soon.

Try to make it work on 1-1.5 salaries, rather than 2 City lawyers going full tilt, is a safer bet.