House buying

thethirdbar

95% mortgages not on help-to-buy are an option too, that's what my husband I are doing. The interest rates are higher with a higher LTV but the mortgage payments + 10% overpayment will still be less than the rent we are currently paying so it makes sense for us rather than waiting another year to get to 10%. Then we'll hopefully remortgage to a lower LTV at the end of our initial fixed-rate term (although with how long it is actually taking us to buy a house we might end up being able to do 10% after all).

Admittedly we are looking at houses around the £100k mark so a good bit cheaper than yours. We've been saving for around a year at the same time as paying off a fixed-term loan & some other credit card debt. We each pay in £200 per mth to our ISAs and then round up any 'spare' cash at the end of the month into a regular saver / onto the credit card. We currently have around £9k saved + our H2B ISA bonuses and will be debt-free (mortgage aside !) when the loan is paid off at the end of August.

My biggest advice would be:

- make sure you check your credit reports with all three CRAs regularly - I checked mine religiously with MSE's Credit Club but then when we were applying for our DIP we discovered a default on my file with Noddle which was a bit of a stress.

- really get on top of your spending - we sit down together every week and update our budget / cashflow with all our incomings and outgoings so we know exactly what we're spending and what we have available to us. As suggested earlier in the thread the debt-free wannabe boards are a really good resource full of helpful people who can assist with this bit if needed.

As long as you're strict with your budgeting and account for every penny though you will be surprised at how quickly you can build up savings if you really make it your focus. Whenever i look at our balances i am very proud of how far we've come since a year ago when i decided i wanted to buy a house!

good luck

Grezz24

Nicosy wrote: »

I agree re HtB potentially being a scam, can easily see headlines down the line about borrowers who reached too far and then hit by interest payments after 5ys, caveat emptor I guess. It was more to spur investment in new builds than a genuine borrower subsidy after all.

Company called Property Pact seem to be trying to create a P2P version, see how that goes.

i dont see it as a scam personally. it helps people get onto the property ladder with a good APR for a mortgage. Yes the govt own 20% of the home but its interest free for 5 year and then you only pay back the interest.

But in that 5 years you can carry on saving and then buy the 20% stake out if needed.

csgohan4

Grezz24 wrote: »

i dont see it as a scam personally. it helps people get onto the property ladder with a good APR for a mortgage. Yes the govt own 20% of the home but its interest free for 5 year and then you only pay back the interest.

But in that 5 years you can carry on saving and then buy the 20% stake out if needed.

Your forgetting the overpriced new builds which drop in value as soon as you walk through the door in some cases