£35k to £245k to £0...

racing_blue

An interesting thread, a good house, and I personally wish you every success.

BUT for security, I'd encourage you to edit your post removing the rightmove link, and asking the two subsequent posters who quoted you to do the same. Also references to your occupations which might imply the house will be unoccupied by day.

Keep safe!

pinkteapot

Fair point - thanks - I've removed the RM link and PM'ed the other posters.

MrTeapot and I work from home often enough that the reference to jobs doesn't worry me so much. My parents-in-law also house-sit when we go away.

Have also added some headings to key posts to help people reading the thread find the interesting bits among all my inane nattering.

tootoo

I saw the house yesterday but didn't get chance to post.

Wow - its fabulous!! Well done you and I wish you lots of luck on your journey.x

pinkteapot

Mental note - switch mortgage in August to increase overpayments

The mortgage on our 'old' house is with HSBC. When we started looking at new houses I used the HSBC calculator to check how much we could borrow and what their rates were.

All was fine until, the day after offering on the new house, I spoke to HSBC for the first time and they said they wouldn't lend to me as my job wasn't permanent (it was a two year contract). Cue mad panic. Entirely self-induced as I should have checked with them earlier. Coming from a career in the city where you change jobs every eighteen months anyway, a two-year contract seemed like a permanent job to me!

HSBC were willing to lend based on MrTeapot's salary alone, but they wouldn't quite give us the amount we wanted on this basis.

A mortgage broker helped us out and the mortgage on the new house is with Santander. Like HSBC, they wouldn't consider my salary but were willing to lend £40k more than HSBC based on MrTeapot's income alone. We've both banked with HSBC for about fifteen years and Santander don't know us from Adam but they were happy to hand over much more cash. Go figure.

The downside is that for the same product (lifetime tracker), Santander are charging 0.5% more on the interest rate. We'll be paying 2.49%, whereas it was going to be 1.99% with HSBC.

I am now permanent :T I've spoken to HSBC and we can't switch the mortgage to them until we've owned the new house for six months. They have a blanket rule of not lending on properties which have been owned for less than six months.

Despite my own feelings towards them, based on the fact they wouldn't lend to us before but Santander would, I'm not one to cut off my nose to spite my face! We'll be switching in six months time, assuming that we can still get a cheaper interest rate by doing so.

If the difference is still 0.5% and if the BoE base rate hasn't changed, switching will save us £53 per month (for a mortgage application fee of £99), which will immediately be an extra £53 a month that we can overpay by.

I just read on the mortgages board that it's more of a faff to make an overpayment with Santander than with other lenders, so looking forward to the move back to HSBC where it's as easy as easy can be.

greent

Lovely house!

Lifes_Grand_Plan

We are with HSBC on their lifetime tracker and have been since we purchased the house. A lot of people say that HSBC have strict lending criteria so I am surprised they lent to us... I think it was the fact that my wife had a HSBC student / graduate account with them.... but it was a 100% mortgage at the time which makes it even more surprising..... I still shudder now thinking about a 100% mortgage and thank my lucky stars that my wife and I were prudent enough to overpay since day 1.

glitterjunkie

Hi pibk teapot, just wanted to say a big welcome and Good luck! I managed to see your house before link was removed andits AMAZING, definitely worth the scary mortgage

Wishing you the best of luck with Mini-teapots. Sounds like you have been on something of a difficult journey and am sure it will ve worth it ♥ I am blessed to have a 1-year old DS, we only have a small 2-bed terrace house with a back yard and the whole reason I am doing MFW is so we can upgrade to a bigger house next year as I so wish he had a garden and a bit more space to run around in, he gets so bored in our little living room! All i want is to be able to give him a lovely house to live in. your mini teapots are going to have a wonderful space to grow up in

I will be watching your journey with interest xx

pinkteapot

Lifes_Grand_Plan wrote: »

We are with HSBC on their lifetime tracker and have been since we purchased the house. A lot of people say that HSBC have strict lending criteria so I am surprised they lent to us... I think it was the fact that my wife had a HSBC student / graduate account with them.... but it was a 100% mortgage at the time which makes it even more surprising..... I still shudder now thinking about a 100% mortgage and thank my lucky stars that my wife and I were prudent enough to overpay since day 1.

My first ever mortgage was a 100% mortgage from HSBC at 4.2 times my salary. :eek: Ah - the fun-filled days of 2006. :rotfl: It was a flat that I ended up selling a few years later with £5k of negative equity. Fortunately I wasn't forced to sell - it was just that I'd met MrTeapot by then and we wanted to move to a house so I decided to cut my losses. Did make me conscious of the risks of high LTV mortgages though!

Thanks glitterjunkie - got everything crossed for good news on the one-cup teapot front this year. Good luck in your journey - it will all be worth it when you get your dream house. I've no doubt at all that your DS is more than happy enough right now though. Having parents as loving as you is by far the most important thing and he won't be missing what he's never known. Also, when I look back on the houses I grew up in, they seem much bigger than they would be if I visited them now. The world looks a lot bigger when you're knee-height. :rotfl:

pinkteapot

A non-MSE decision...

We've decided to reduce MrTeapot's pension contributions for the next year or two. He's been making high contributions for the last few years, as he had three years of contracting jobs before that where he wasn't paying into a pension at all. As a result, he'd fallen behind with the size of his pension pot relative to his age.

His employer's contributions won't be affected, so we're still getting all the benefit that we can from them.

This, combined with him recently getting his annual inflation-type pay-rise at work results in an extra £200 per month on his net pay. :T

Although we don't need this money at the moment, if littluns come along and the budget gets tight it will certainly help a lot, and until then it'll enable us to increase our OPs by that amount, to get a bigger head-start on knocking down the mortgage.

The reason for the title of this post is that I'm sure people on the Savings and Investments board would tell us it's the wrong thing to do. Pension contributions are tax-efficient, and the pension investments should grow at more than the interest rate we'll be paying on the mortgage. We've made this decision for psychological instead of MSE reasons - so we've got less budget worry and can work on that mortgage which still sounds huge to me.

Three weeks until we move in.

alwaystryyourbest

Good luck with your journey and your move, xx
We are due to move in to our forever house hopefully in February as well.. I'm so excited to get into our new house as I have looked through the rightmove pictures about 100 times.( I bet you have to )