Your first time buying

The_Pixi

I am 32 and my partner is 28, we bought our first home in May this year. Since moving to London in 2007 I had decided to start saving for a deposit and get on the ladder. I started on 16k a year with a 'small' £1500 loan from Santander to pay back over the first year (Incidentally Santander voluntarily coughed up for mis sold PPI) and rented a room by London Bridge at £500 per month - This never went up until I left in 2011 (nice, but lucky)

In late 2008 I received inheritance from my Grandmothers estate of about £11600, This would have been a 10% deposit + fees back home, but as we know the economy fell of a cliff, plus I was happy in London and decided to invest the money and start saving, now my loan was paid off.

With the inheritence I made some stock market investments with Santander in March 2009, being new to all this I would say that was naive, however, I now know that was the bottom of the stock market crash and if you look at all shares around then they begin to rise quite fast in 09 & 10 so I made £1900 on my £3000 investment, whilst still saving money.

My salary had increased a good ammount and I decided to only give myself the same money a month to play with as I had in 2007 so I was managing £500 a month in savings.

In the mean time I met my partner and we decided in 2011 to rent a 1 bed flat in central which cost us £600 a month each, which was only £100 more than I'd been paying since 2007. I got lucky again with this rental as we were finding it hard to locate a property that had space, we managed one two mins down the road from my previous rental in a lovely Thames side warehouse and the landlord wanted a 2 year contract, which was brilliant, as my concern with renting was always the instability of it all.

Plus we could fix our utilities, and rent so i knew I would be able to save £400 per month for the next two years, also wages weren't, still aren't rising so fixing all those bills meant it didn't matter so much.

Then in late 2012 my partner and I decided to buy a house (my constant going on about ever rising rents with no asset to speak of brought him around)

By now I had about £22000 saved and he had £35000 and he was managing £1000 a month in saving. The first property we made a offer on fell thorough at valuation and the vendor would not budge, this seemed like a blow but turned out good news. the delay meant we now had saved more money up and a house we saw came up priced at £320000. This was a larger scaled period property to the first and had off street parking, we don't drive but now its an option.

With the extra money we were able to save during the extra months we were able to pay the 'how dare you spend your savings on something tax' at 3% to get the better home.

The place has needed lots of cosmetic work inside - and the garden and front areas will be worked on this summer, new kitchen and bathroom in a few years time but they are functional for now.

The real aim is to overpay and overpay in 5 years we want as close to or above 50% LTV to help defend against the coming interest rate rise. This won't be a forever house but we are looking at 10years at least. once it is paid off there will be many more choices as to what to do.