Mortgage v take home pay

truescot

Having to move soon due to growing family and trying to work out how much house we can afford (we have a decent deposit, so the bank are willing to lend us more than we are comfortabe spending).

Interested to know what percentage of take-home pay people spend on mortgage payments ONLY(excluding insurances etc).

Doing some quick net research I've seen figures from 17% to 60%. We are about 18% at the moment and feel like we have loads of disposable income, the houses we are looking at would make it anywhere between 32% and 44%. This seems alot, but the figures look like we could manage, with a bit of tightening of the belts (for once!). We have no other debt and this is percentage of TAKE HOME pay.

beecher

Depends on the level of your wage really. If you earn £60,000 then paying a third on your mortgage still leaves you with £40,000. If you're earning £20,000 you're only left with £13,000. If you'd have to tighten your belts to afford the houses now then I'd be a bit wary, unless that just means doing away with a lot of luxuries which you wouldn't miss. With a growing family won't your outgoings increase in the years to come, even without taking inflation into account?

Ultimately no-one can tell you what level of disposable income you'd be happy with - maybe try putting away the equivalent of 44% for a month and see how you manage?

mitchaa

My mortgage payments on my singular income is around 40% of take home.

With Joint it reduces to around 21% take home.

Dime_Bar

We are at about 24% of take home pay but where at 39% when we bought the house 2.5 years ago.

epsilondraconis

Ours is 32% for my income and 22% for our joint income.

Hope everything works out okay.

beecher

I pay about 24% of my single take home pay and would definitely not be keen to spend more, but that's because my pay isn't high enough to sustain it. Plus I wouldn't really want to live in 'Spam Valley' - prefer to spend the money I have on other things. I realise others might prefer to have the biggest/best house they can possibly stretch to though.

PeteHi

26% going up to 42% in August, ouch!

Its amazing the amount you can save on the comparison sites. We've managed to cut our monthly outgoings on things such as elec, gas, water, phone, insurance and life assurance by around £350 from June to July, so hopefully the blow should be softened slightly!

stevie_wonder

Mortgage payment £689, take home salary (net pay) approx £2800, so around 25%.

nick1977

Single income varies between £1550 -£1650 take home, with a mortgage payment of about £758, so roughly 47%. Was about 30% until I split up from wife and bought her out of the property.
Seem to cope OK although I don't have an extravagant lifestyle. Manage to have a couple of small breaks away with the girlfriend, run a car, and go out for meals every so often. Still manage to put about £100 away a month too, which I will draw on if interest rates shoot up.

lisyloo

I pay about 40%, but have a decent income and that makes a difference as point out by beecher.
It make a huge difference whether you have debts, kids, smoke, drink, have pets etc. so it varies hugely.
If you don't have other debts then that is a good start.

tgon

37% with no kids, pets, bad habits (that I'll admit to) or other debts. Plus healthy "rainy day" savings. Should be okay if the economic climate stabilizes in the next couple of years.