Partner wants *much* bigger house

ruperts

All seems kinda moot given the requirement to find a lender willing to lend more than 7x a combined income of about £55k. Add childcare into the mix and you might not even get £200k never mind £400k.

Spidernick

getmore4less wrote: »

The "if we need to find the money we will" has started already you need £15k for SDLT on a £500k house and another £2k for the EA to sell your £200k one if you are good at knocking them down to 1%.

If it's going to cost around half the cost of extending just to move (essentially wasted/lost money), why not just extend? Lots of people are going down this route (we did the same, but outwards rather than upwards) precisely because moving is so expensive (not to mention stressful).

Added to that, you continue to pay Council Tax at the same rate (it's the buyer after you that pays at the re-valued rate - assuming it is the same the whole country over), you don't have all the admin associated with moving, and don't spend ages putting your stamp on a new property. Given the OP's situation, this seems a 'no brainer' to me, unless there is more to it than that and the OP's partner wants the (perceived) social status of a semi-detached or detached property perhaps?

tlc678910

Logan99 wrote: »

Hi,

"Our combined income is £3500 per month and total outgoings over 2k. We have no savings."

Given that you have no savings your "total outgoings" must actually be £3500. You and your partner could start to discuss and consider what you would cut back on to find an extra £1000 each month. If the second child means £500 childcare you could consider where you will find £1500.

Trying to put this money aside each month is an excellent idea. If you can't do it then as someone else has already pointed out you would be getting further into debt each month if you had the huge mortgage.

You might find you can actually save £400 or £600 for example without too much hardship and you could then look at what kind of mortgage size you could service with that amount extra. This makes your starting point what you can afford rather than what you want.

In your budget you should try to account an amount of money for things that don't crop up all the time but will eventually like repairs and maintenance, decoration, replacing vehicles, annual insurances, holidays etc as you might manage for the next six months or so but have no chance of saving anything towards a major repair bill or summer holiday.

Good luck