Is there any way my sister can get her first mortgage with these circumstances?

MichaelMoneySaver

Dear MoneySavers, I'd be very grateful for any advice you might be able to offer.

My sister is single and 39 years old and has rented all of her life. She has saved a deposit of £35K over many years. She has always been self-employed, and a very hard worker with a net income of around £14K per annum (may not seem like much but self-employment can be hard!). She is an extremely reliable, diligent person. In the last 2 years, she has been in teacher training, so her self-employed income has fallen off to lower than this. TBH, she had a very difficult experience in teacher training (mainly with pupil discipline), and although she is now willing to do supply work, the prospect of a salaried job as a teacher is pretty much a no-go for her. She is currently looking into other salaried jobs, e.g. the Civil Service.

Our mum who is 78 and retired, owns her own house which is worth approximately £450K. We have one other sister who is married, 37 years old and renting with an NHS salary of £30K. I am a postgraduate student so I am unable to help.

Is there any way you know of that my sister (the first one) could get a mortgage, by somehow leveraging the value of our mother's house combined with her existing £35K deposit? Or, if our other sister (the NHS one) was to help her with a guarantor mortgage, would that affect the NHS sister's ability to get a mortgage herself in future? Is the only way forward for my sister to get a salaried job (of say £25K+)?

Thank you.

Caz3121

what sort of property prices would she be looking at.....there will be different answers if property £60k or £260k

theoretica

If she is currently job hunting than buying before she finds a job is probably a poor idea - as she might want to choose where to live based on the job she secures.  This means she presumably won't be buying until she knows what her salary is - or has decided to continue self employed. 

yksi

A 14K income can get a mortgage on its own, even when self-employed (need a good broker for this). But as Caz3121 indicated the amount the lender is willing to provide is probably going to be the catch. They'd probably consider somewhere around 3x the income. Some single people will say that gives them a plenty big budget for the two-bedroom place they want in a small town - some will say that makes it impossible to get a shoebox studio they need inside the M25. In my case I'd be thrilled to get that kind of mortgage level but I suspect not many will agree with me