Savings after mortgage? London

luke0270

Hello all! 

I’m saving to buy my first home on the outskirts of London. 

From next year the help to buy scheme is changing so only purchases of a maximum of 430k. Now where in / around London is a house worth that ... anyway back to my question. 

The area I’m looking at is around 450-500k. Although I’m not sure what’s a good safety net to have after bills etc? I’ve worked out mortgage gas electric water etc is around £1800 a month - I’ve over estimated (to be safe, I think) bills for petrol / phone / food / tv etc at around another £800? So £2600 which would leave me with around £600 a month after. 

Is this perfectly normal or a possible dangerous move?
Please advise! Thank you 😊 

MovingForwards

Have you had a play with some mortgage calculators to see what would happen if interest rates went up by about 5 - 8%?

How does that then fit with your £600?

Water / council tax you can look at the respective provider and see how much that is.

If you say how many rooms, people can say how much they pay per month.

Are you working from home / self employed or does your estimated petrol include the travel to your place of work? Have you taken into account parking costs, if any? Plus insurance, tax, MOT, maintenance / repairs? It may be worth looking at public transport to see if that is cheaper / quicker.

It's all down to lender affordability and if you would feel comfortable with having £600pm to save, fun fund, home repairs, emergency home things is secondary.

I will have a bit less than you left per month, when I complete, but my purchase is also a lot less!

steampowered

So you would be paying £1,800 pm on the property and would have £1,400 pm to cover everything else.

That sounds perfectly fine to me. £1,400pm is massively above what the average person in the UK has to spend after property costs.

People often have to stretch themselves a bit when buying a first time property. As a young singleton (I assume?) you are in a good position to minimise costs if needed.

The only thing I would add is that new build properties lose value as soon as you buy them and HTB has lots of strings attached. You could consider buying a second hand property instead. While you may not be able to borrow as much on the mortgage outside HTB, the property would be better value, and it wouldn't come with all the strings attached to HTB.