We have a house worth £515k with a mortgage (SE England) and I have £282k cash after a flat sale to bring our buying power to £800k. We’ve been looking at houses in this range but the perfect house came up which ticks all boxes (except needing painting and new carpets) for £925k. Right now we have about £1000 a month left over to save, both work full time and two small kids so I am enjoying having the flexibility and safety net of two incomes which can cover the mortgage on their own. But now I’m thinking with the enormous amount of stamp duty we would pay, maybe break the mortgage and borrow the extra £125k needed to get this house. I’ve got the mortgage in principle just now and it would be around £600 extra a month mortgage payments if we extend our mortgage by 10 years so taking us past retirement age instead of mortgage ending a few years before. I am just stuck thinking that all the £800k houses have some sacrifice and maybe we should go for this more expensive house. Another factor is we have a 5 year fixed mortgage as I never thought I’d need to extend our mortgage, but my flat did sell for less than I paid for it. Coupled with that the interest rate we got right now is good at 3.9% and would go up to 5.2% and is 1.5 years into the 5 year fixed. Really wishing I’d gone for a 2 year fixed so we wouldn’t be on the hook for £8k to break it!
I know this is a first world problem but I just don’t want to make a mistake as it’s enormous sums of money and I’ve never had this much in my life and I’m afraid of making an error we can’t recover from. But equally I don’t want to be so risk averse that we don’t have more space for the kids.