How Much Can I Borrow Calculators

Sideburno

When recently looking at mortgage's my wife and I have been using the online calculators for all the major lenders.

Some come back with what we need, Natwest for example whereas Nationwide comes back with an offer which is £30,000 less.

Is this because the calculators are pants or does this reflect what these lenders are like?

The reason this is of particular concern is because Nationwide offer a much better interest rate than Natwest which makes the difference of almost £100.00 per month

kingstreet

Nationwide usually offers slightly less.

If using HTB - EL make sure you factor-in 3% of the equity loan, or you risk being out on affordability. This applies to all the HTB - EL lenders.

Sideburno

Hi,

That makes sense then, do you mean 3% of the equity loan per year?

kingstreet

Yes. Divided by twelve and entered in one of the appropriate boxes.

D00gie72

Having just recently contacted a lot of different lenders - I wouldn't rely on the on-line calculators at all. I think most lenders now have different criteria as to how much they will lend - which is often different from what the on-line calculators say. I would either use a broker - or phone around a few of your prefered lenders and see how much they each offer you. Might take a little while of hanging on the phone - but worth it to get a true idea of how much you can borrow.

kingstreet

FWIW the broker calculators are hardly ever wrong. That may be down to experience in adding the right data to the right box, but often, if we get a different answer on a DIP as we got on the affordability calculator, we can tell the client has not told us everything.

The best example of this is when a credit commitment has been repaid in full in the last month. The client doesn't tell us about it, we get a higher affordability calculator figure.

Then, when we DIP it, the system picks up the commitment because it does not yet know of the repayment and the DIP figure is lower as a result and we get a lower figure than we expected.

We call the client and the clients explains they didn't mention the commitment as it has been repaid. This happens a lot with a card balance at month-end, repaid in full.