How far in advance to make an offer on a house?

ReadingTim

Cakeguts wrote: »

You aren't ready to buy a house yet because you haven't learnt how to save. Saving the deposit is practice for the amount of saving that you have to do when you are a house owner. Owning is not like renting if something breaks you have got to pay for it to be repaired. You are responsible for repairing anything that goes wrong with the house like a new roof, new windows, new doors, new guttering, new fencing for the garden as well as new kitchens and bathrooms or getting a plumber out to mend a leak. Boilers don't last for ever. You also have to save in case either of you lose your job and you can't pay the mortgage. There are no benefits to pay the mortgage for you. If you lose your job you might get the mortgage interest paid for a limited amount of time but only the interest.

When you own a house you have to do a lot more saving than just for a deposit. So if you haven't saved for the deposit you don't really understand how to save in order to keep owning a house and to not be at risk of it being repossessed by the bank.

That would have been a perfectly valid comment to make 20+ years ago when you could buy a house for 3 or 4 times annual salary. Given property is now 7, 8, 9+ times salary, it's less realistic - average furst time buyers can be saving for more than 5 years for a deposit, according to this article.

Just because the bulk of the deposit comes from the 'bank of mum and dad', it doesn't mean the OP hasn't done their bit too, and your well-meaning advice comes across as jealousy of the OP's good fortune.