Direct or Broker?

flatshandy

After years of thinking about it we decided to sell & look for a new house, and surprisingly fell in love with the second one we saw.

If our property sells at the agents' valuations (we're in London) then we'll have the following:

• £400k for the deposit (that's our equity minus fees and stamp duty)
• £198k portable mortgage with First Direct, at 0.49% above base rate (you can see why I'd like to keep that a while longer).

We'll need an additional £202k (or £400k total), which i would want to fix for at least 2 years, because it's a leap, let's face it, and I want to budget.

My husband earns £80k, and had bonuses of £14k, £23k and £24k in the last three years. We have a loan of £15000 (mostly for a car and dental stuff), and £6500 on a credit card at 0%.

Last year however, we ran our current account mostly in the red as we decided to help my mum with some financial difficulties (stupid pay day loans). We have paid all of that back with this year's bonus, and she will pay us back when she's able to.

In a quick chat FD said they usually go up to 4.75 x salary, but that the bonuses might get taken into account with affordability. We take childcare vouchers at the moment, but they will stop in July. He also pays into a pension and a couple of share save schemes, and sends money to his mum.

I'm confused about what we should do. Staying with FD means keeping that nice interest rate on half of the mortgage which helps with affordability in the short term. But as we're stretching things a bit should we go to a broker instead? What if we apply to FD and they say no - will that affect other applications through a broker?

thanks for the help. I've never bought and sold before - we bought our current place just over 9 years ago, thinking we'd stay 3 or 4 years...

ACG

This could be very very tight.

You have £21k worth of debt on top of what you want to borrow.

Having a decline should not impact on any future mortgages too much. It will however be an additional credit check, there is no harm in trying however from what I can gather the market in London is pretty good so delaying may not be ideal.

If this were 6-8 months ago, I would have said give FD a try and if that fails go to a broker. However now im not so sure, it depends on the agents and the vendor. If they are happy to let you try FD initially and then a different lender fine, if they just want a quick sale then I think I would go to a broker.