Rules for buying our council house in Scotland??

sabbykins

Hi,
We have lived in our council house for 23 years and are thinking of buying. We live in Fife and i cant find info anywhere about how much discount we would get etc.
Anyone know?

Thanks.

Moncs_2

Hi,

My dad bought his council house in Edinburgh in October 2003, it was valued at £100,000 at the time and since he has been a council tenent for overr 30 years, he got the full 65% discount and got it for £35,000.

I presume Fife council have the same system, the only stipulation that they enforce that you cannot sell the house for three years after the purchase otherwise you have to pay back a large part of the discount they gave you.

sabbykins

Thanks Moncs, are you sure your dad got 65% discount? I read that it was 60% (which is pretty good anyway )
And i hope you dont mind me asking, but how old was your Dad at the time, and did he get a good mortgage? I've heard of older FTB's getting these awful mortgages that just pay the interest, we dont want one of those.

Thanks xx

Moncs_2

sabbykins wrote:

Thanks Moncs, are you sure your dad got 65% discount? I read that it was 60% (which is pretty good anyway )
And i hope you dont mind me asking, but how old was your Dad at the time, and did he get a good mortgage? I've heard of older FTB's getting these awful mortgages that just pay the interest, we dont want one of those.

Thanks xx

My dad was 65 at the time, and he got a very good rate of 4.4% fixed for three years from Halifax (HBoS)

Yeah it was 65%, maybe in the almost two years since they have changed the rate from 65% down to 60%.

sabbykins

Thanks
My hubby is 51, and we are a bit worried about having huge monthly repayments :-/ We have only been paying £230 PCM rent you see, so we will need to find a good deal or we'll be struggling. about £400 PCM is our limit i think.
4.4% is excellent from what i've seen! How long is your dads repayment period?

Moncs_2

sabbykins wrote:

Thanks
My hubby is 51, and we are a bit worried about having huge monthly repayments :-/ We have only been paying £230 PCM rent you see, so we will need to find a good deal or we'll be struggling. about £400 PCM is our limit i think.
4.4% is excellent from what i've seen! How long is your dads repayment period?

Yeah 4.4% was a great rate, he took that over a three year interest only mortgage as he plans to sell the house once that period is up and move to the US.

The best thing to do is visit a few high street banks and BS's, and see what the best rate is, what I prefer to do is get a fixed rate mortgage for X amount of years and transfer it at the end of the term to another lender with a better rate. Reason for that is, I like to know on a month to month basis what my outgoings are and with a fixed rate mortgage I can do that.

Looking around, I think the best rate at the moment it about 4.7%, check out the mortgage calculator below and enter your figures and that will tell you what you will be paying.

http://www.cml.org.uk/cml_new/pub_fresh_calculator.asp

sabbykins

Thankyou Moncs, you have given me some great advice there.
i'm going to have a look around at different lenders now....

Thanks

Moncs_2

sabbykins wrote:

Thankyou Moncs, you have given me some great advice there.
i'm going to have a look around at different lenders now....

Thanks

No problem at all, Good Luck

aliasojo

Highest discount is 60%. Details for Falkirk area here, but it will be the same all over Scotland.

http://www.falkirk.gov.uk/lawadmin/legalservices/chs/how_much_discount_info.htm

yogi3

don't forget when the house is yours you'll need buildings assurance and possibly life/redundancy assurance.

Fifer

This link gives some useful contact information.

http://tinylink.com/?N1OyTIkzS4