Planning ahead as FTB, any advice helpful!

Jo_R_2

Hi all

A couple of quick Qs really.

Me and OH currently rent but are eventually hoping to buy - not right now but in a few (bit vague, at least 3 but quite possibly more) years' time, mainly because we don't have a deposit saved.

We have worked out provisionally that we could start saving around £400 a month between us in the next couple of months, so say over three years that's £14400 for a deposit.

The houses I have been looking at are in the price range £109950 to £129950, this is for 3-bed semis local to us.

OH currently earns £16500 (roughly £1000 every 4 weeks), I'm currently a stay-at-home mum with around £925 coming in per month from tax credits/child benefit/child maintenance but plan to return to work shortly - not sure of what salary will be but ensuring not any worse off than currently.

So my questions are (and I know you can only go on what we know right now), how does the potential deposit of £14400 sound for a house in that price range (11% if I worked out correctly for the higher end of the range) and then, if we start given our current financial income, what could we be looking at borrowing as is?

I'm partly asking (this prob sounds a bit backward!) because in job hunting I'm obviously considering salaries so want a starting point of what we could hope to be able to borrow on our current income then hopefully make things as advantageous as possible by going back to work, being able to save more for a deposit and hopefully be able to secure more on a mortgage if we should need it.

I've had a play around with some online calculators and get lots of different figures coming up as to what we could borrow. Also I gather some places allow you to include tax credits as part of your income - does this apply to other forms of income?

Also I noticed on one calculator that jigging about the number of children we have altered whether we could potentially be offered a mortgage: we have 3, how is this included, is it included as a factor with all mortgage calculations - not that I'm planning on shipping any of them off LOL!:D