Help on credit card for mortgage deposit!

Stevo77

Hi, I've recently come into some money via inheritance which I am going to be combining with savings to put a deposit on a house.
I have been looking at houses for a few weeks and have found a place that I really like and am seriously interested in putting an offer in for.
My problem is that the inheritance will not be available to me until January so obviously this is going to cause a problem with placing an offer on the house I like.
I was wondering if anybody could advise me on wheter it would be a worthwhile idea to geta 0% credit card such as the Barclaycard Breathe offer (12 months at 0% apparently) to provide the money which I could then pay back in full in January.
I have no previous credit issues - 100% clean as far as I know and it would be for approx £12k.
Thanks for any help/suggestions etc! :beer:

_Andy_

No mortgage lender will accept that as a form of deposit.

mstopham

_Andy_ wrote: »

No mortgage lender will accept that as a form of deposit.

Are there not some where you can use a cheque to pay into a current account and get round it that way?

_Andy_

mstopham wrote: »

Are there not some where you can use a cheque to pay into a current account and get round it that way?

No, my point is that a mortgage lender won't accept borrowed funds as a deposit source.

YorkshireBoy

It's possible you could use a super balance transfer card to put 0% (with a circa 3% fee) cash into your current account, which you could use to put towards your deposit. Whether it's the right thing to do is a different matter...

1. Any credit card debt seen on the mortgage credit search will affect the amount you'll be able to borrow for the mortgage, and

2. Won't the house*, and the cost of borrowing for it, be a good bit cheaper in January?

* Prices fell 2.2% last month, and 13% YOY, and there's a little something called recession and credit crunch being mentioned quite a bit at the moment!

My advice?...wait.

Stevo77

Hmm interesting - the idea of using a no-cost credit card to help with the deposit actually came from "Martin's" downloadable mortgage advice :

"Given what you can save, it might even be worth taking out a cheap unsecured
loan in order to give you a deposit or even a carefully used 0% credit card (see
www.moneysavingexpert.com for details). But make sure you take into account the loan
repayments when you’re calculating what you can afford to pay towards your mortgage
each month."

I'm surprised this would be mentioned if it was not something that mortgage lenders would allow - though perhaps the "see moneysavingexpert.com" part is about precisely this detail?

In terms of waiting until January, I'm all for getting the best possible deal - if I were to put in an offer it would probably be laughed at initially (eg off the top of my head, bidding 118k for the marketprice of 139k) and certainly aren't going to go overboard to get it completed quickly so don't think I'm in too much of a hurry.Unfortunately to balance this fact - the property I've seen is significantly better than anything else in the price range which starts as an itch and turns into a nagging feeling that someone else will get there first! There's also the gamble of how much lower things will go - there is no science of course and a series of small factors (feelgood factors such as Obama, drastic interest rate cuts etc) could mean things don't get significantly cheaper.

Anyway, I'm waffling about things that truly go over my head. The main point of posting was of course to see how viable anybody considered the 0% card to be. If the feeling is that it's not an option, maybe I won't even be able to speculate about good times to buy until the money comes through

Sammy_Girl

Hi Steveo,

Our first property purchase took 4 months from putting in the offer to completing. So, you could still proceed with the offer now and by the time you and the seller are ready to exchange it could be January, when your inheritance will have come through. As long as you know exactly how much deposit you will have and you're sure the money will be with you in January, you can still proceed with the admin.

Obviously, I'm no expert and completely a layman, but that's my view!!