Mortgage - first time buyers

lil-pop

Hi!
My partner and I are looking to save for a mortgage for our first home together. The houses we are looking at are currently only just being built so we still have some time!!
Was wondering if anyone has any good tips for saving, good savings accounts and/or mortgage lenders??
Its so hard to save when already renting and I am not currently getting frequent enough hours with work so hard to know how to budget!
Any tips would be really helpful! :j

Thanks in advance x

Morgage_Confused

"The houses we are looking at are currently only just being built so we still have some time"

Just be wary of new builds and the "deals" they give you on them. They are often overpriced and sometimes the incentives offered arnt worth it.

lil-pop

No deals as far as I know.

Its Summerfield Houses that are building them. Have not heard any bad press as of yet.

:eek:

Gary123456790

lil-pop wrote: »

Was wondering if anyone has any good tips for saving

I dont mean to sound patronising if you have done the following already:

- Cancel Sky tv (if you have it)
- Cancel contract phones and go PAYG (if you have any)
- If you own an expensive car, sell it and get a cheaper one. If you have a lease or HP one, buy a cheap one outright
- Cook from scratch more!
- Rent out a room in your house
- Ebay/Amazon what you dont want/need. Listing a book on amazon takes 20 seconds. Sitting in a bookcase it is just money you cant access.
- Make sandwiches at home for lunch instead of buying
- Borrow books from the library instead of buying
- Go through your monthly bank statement and work out what you can cut down. Gas/elec, phone/internet, etc. I called Virgin last week and told them BT was cheaper, gave me £9 a month off as a "loyalty discount".
- and Talk frequently with your partner to discuss how much you want to save, when by and what this will allow you to buy.

This gives you an incentive to save as you know you are getting there. Everyone can do it, it just takes discipline.

Best savings accounts can be found from comparisons on this site.

The more deposit you have is a BIG benefit - the rates for 85% mortgages are much better than 90% and a lot less hassle to get!

Gary.

CharlyReiss

Hi Gary,

That's really good advice, I'm saving for my first house too and found this useful.

Lil Pop - I have found writing an extensive list of everything I buy really useful and I've highlighted what is a necessary purchase and what is necessary. It helped me to see where I can make savings

Charly

DannyboyMidlands

Definitely do a budget and list everything you spend over a year. There's a good one on this site but I just did mine and partners with pen and paper. Has to be a joint exercise.

Once you have everything on there be ruthless:

1. Cut out all non-essentials. Nights out drinking, holidays and buying lunch were big ones for me.

2. For essentials you must find a better deal. We cut our weekly shop to £50 per week for two by going to Lidl. Use bill monitor site for your mobile phones, our bills dropped from nearly £40pcm to around £15pcm.

Santander had a decent savings account a while ago called the first home saver. It payed 5%. A bit of a faff to open in branch but worth it for the rate.

1st Direct have a regular saver paying 8%. You need a 1st Direct current account to qualify. Maybe have that as your joint account?

At first saving is really tough but then you get used to it and then you begin to like it. We bought our house last year but still save money in the same manner.

gazfocus

I must echo selling things on ebay/amazon to raise money. We are on our final stretch with listing things on ebay and have got a few things finishing this week that will hopefully give us the rest of the deposit we need to buy the house we want.

We also cancelled our Virgin Media package, saving us £80 a month and paid off some debts to save a further £200 a month.