First time buying help please

sancho

Hello there, me and my wife are looking at buying a house after so long renting. Unfortunately i think we have a few problems!! Can anybody help us out?

My wife is a nursery nurse, and i am a college lecturer, she is paid monthly as a salary.

I, on the otherhand, have a 0.5 contract (part time) which i have just got, that is then topped up working for an agency at the same college, the contract is guaranteed though, well as guaranteed as any job is.

Together we earn £30,500 before tax per year. We are looking at houses around £128,000, and us putting down £18,000, which we have saved ourselves.

That's reasonably straight forward i suppose, however my wife is on maternity leave. On the phone Abbey has said they won't take her wage into account, are all lenders the same? She has every intention of returning to work.

Her maternity only started 3 weeks ago, our daughter is three weeks old today and she took holiday up until the point she left. Therefore if thy ask her for her last three payslips then they will not show she is on maternity, should we just not tell them?

I am 26 and my wife is 28. Has anyone got any advice for us as we really need to move, and both really want to buy.

Any more information needed then just ask!!

Cannon_Fodder

And if your wife changes her mind after a few more weeks enjoying being with baby?

You find yourselves unable to meet the mortgage payments, lose the house, they sell it cheaply as it is a repo, so you lose the deposit, its back to square one...

For the sake of a few weeks, after patiently saving £18k...?

Can you not survive for a few more weeks until the wife goes back to work - no financial uncertainty, no lying to defraud a lender...

Takes advantage of a fairly widely expected downturn in house prices in the autumn/winter, too...

sancho

Cannon_Fodder wrote: »

And if your wife changes her mind after a few more weeks enjoying being with baby?

You find yourselves unable to meet the mortgage payments, lose the house, they sell it cheaply as it is a repo, so you lose the deposit, its back to square one...

For the sake of a few weeks, after patiently saving £18k...?

Can you not survive for a few more weeks until the wife goes back to work - no financial uncertainty, no lying to defraud a lender...

Takes advantage of a fairly widely expected downturn in house prices in the autumn/winter, too...

I understand what you're saying, but if it meant we would lose the house then my wife would go back to work, no matter how much 'fun' she is having at home! She is the sensible one out of the two of us

It is defrauding them then? I have just been on the phone to Lloyds and they've agreed in principle a mortgage and didn't ask me if my wife was on maternity, i didn't get the impression i was lying to anyone, and if i hadn't have mentioned to the woman at Abbey that i had a three week old then i don't think i would have even thought about it. In fact when i went in to Abbey this morning and said that my wife was on maternity and my job problems he said "i can't see that being a problem" So now i'm even more confused!!

Lloyds said that because my 'two' jobs are the same profession it's not a problem, would that be the same for most lenders?

Would you say to keep on renting then? I just worry that we'll always be chasing a house, yeah we'll have more of a deposit next year, but the house prices will be higher too, and i live in a pretty expensive area.

Thanks again

sancho

We've also got another 5K in savings, didn't want to wipe out everything we own with a deposit though