Renting advice for first timer

dboughtwood

Hi there i m dave and am 25yrs old. me and a friend are looking to rent either a 2 bed flat or house in the cambridgeshire area but we dont really have a clue where to start, what to expect, how to figure out how much we can afford etc and was wondering what advice people have for us as its about time we moved out and am deperate to start doing things ourselves.

we live in a small village bout 8 miles from cambridge on way to haverhill and would like to stay around the area or closer to cambridge without going to expensive. we make around £1100 a month each and minus our own bills we have around £800-£900 a month for oursleves and was wondering what sort of price rent we should be looking at and the expected bills??? also how do we go about finding a place to rent as we have been currently going to view a fair few and was wondering what happends when we do decide on a property to rent????

many thanks

morg_monster

Hiya
I'll try to help a little... things you need to consider for bills etc:
council tax (you should be able to estimate how much this is from the council website; a 2bed flat may be the third lowest band)
gas bill (difficult to estimate but we pay about £400 a year in a 1 bed flat)
elec bill (again difficult but we pay about £300)
water bill (depends on whether it is metered; I have heard about £20 if metered, ours is about £300 a year unmetered)
TV licence (erk... about £130 a year now?)
Phone (if you have a BT line think it is about £12 basic line rental now, more for calls)
Broadband
Sky TV?!
contents insurance (always wise, looking at at least £15 a month between the 2 of you)
Then there is food which I would say at least £100, depends on how and how much you like to eat!

As for how much you spend on rent - well they say you shouldn't go over a third of takehome, but I would go below that if you can. Do you like going out a lot in the eves, buy lunch every day, that kind of thing, generallly get to the end of the month and wonder where all your cash went? Might be a good idea to keep a spending diary to work out how much cash you spend in the average month. You may find you need to tighten your belt and cut out some of the unnecessary spending to be able to afford rent and bills; especially if you are moving out of you parents and weren't paying market rent or bills etc, real life can come as a bit of a shock sometimes (speaking from experience!).

Have you been going to agencies to find possible flats, or private landlords through ads in the paper or similar? I guess depending which it is, the process of renting would be different; I only know what happened when we went through an agency. In a nutshell - we told them we liked the place and wanted to rent it, we went to the branch with info like passport so they could begin the credit check, filled in some forms, read through the contract (but didn't sign it at that point). Then they ran the credit check, contacted our employers for references, and we agreed a move in date about 4 weeks later. The day before we were due to move in (since it was a saturday), we went to the branch, signed the contract, paid our deposit and months rent in advance by building society cheque. Next day we met the inventory clerk at the flat, she did the inventory and gave us our keys, then voila we moved all our stuff in!!