Moving House Process - Where To Start?!

stressedette

I have a mortgaged property in my name, with approx £85k outstanding. The building society have auto-calculated my property value increases over the years to a current value of £142k, but I’d be surprised if this were actually the case. 

I’d like to buy a bigger house jointly with my partner, who currently has no property or savings. 

I also currently have about £13k of unsecured debt. 

I’m trying to figure out the feasibility of moving at the moment, and if it is feasible, what order things should be done in. 

Do we look at properties first? Do we try to get a DiP? Do I get my house valued by an estate agent? Do I put my house on the market? Should I refresh the decor in my house prior to putting it on the market or getting it valued? Do I need a solicitor right away? 

I’ve seen for example a property valued at £270k. Assuming a 5% (£13500) deposit on a basic mortgage calculator, our salaries should afford this. This would allow me to clear my debts (about £13k) with the remaining equity, and then anything additional from the house sale (anything from £10k-30k?!) would cover any offer we might make above the home report value, along with stamp duty and legal fees? 

I think stamp duty would be around £4k. Not sure what to budget for legal fees, or any additional costs or considerations?

Any advice would be much appreciated.  

Grizebeck

Pay of your debt before moving.

MultiFuelBurner

The above statement is not untrue and will allow you to potentially borrow more but it's also a throw away one liner and doesn't help you all the way.

Imo the best thing to do is for you both to go and see a mortgage broker and be completely honest about all finances.

See what they can offer to you.

Bigphil1474

OP, We decided to sell up and find a nicer place about a year ago. I spent about 7 or 8 months going round the house and doing all those jobs I never got round to doing, plus some refreshing of the general decor. We had a couple of unrelated issues which delayed things but we finally put the house on the market about 3 weeks ago. 

You don't need a solicitor straight away. We've only just sorted one for selling. 

My journey was like this - fix the house as best I could, get 3 estate agents in to value, picked the best EA, house on market, looked at some houses in the first couple of weeks whilst hosting viewings, sorted a solicitor, stopped viewing other properties for now, still hosting viewings waiting for an offer, will get an agreement in Principal if we decide to go with a mortgage, will start viewing properties again once we have an offer as we now have a better understanding of what we need. I'd say that viewing other properties was partly useful as we weren't 100% sure what we wanted, and now we do. Unfortunately, the down side is if you find the perfect house, you can't really put an offer in until you have an offer on yours. We've already missed out on one house we loved as they accepted an offer from someone else just after we had been.

Hopefully, once we've had an acceptable offer, we'll find a nice place, get an offer accepted, get a mortgage if required, go through the sales and buying process, and then move.

We've budgeted roughly about £10k for fees including stamp duty:-

Costs of selling - EA fees - ours are 0.9% + VAT of sale price, Legal Fees - we've been quoted something like £1,200 for selling (I can't quite remember but we tried a few local solicitors and they were all pretty similar).
Cost of buying - Stamp duty if above £250k, Legal Fees - I think we had a quote of around £1,500 ish.
Moving Fees - typically £1k - £2k if you aren't moving too far.

MFWannabe

stressedette said:

I have a mortgaged property in my name, with approx £85k outstanding. The building society have auto-calculated my property value increases over the years to a current value of £142k, but I’d be surprised if this were actually the case. 

I’d like to buy a bigger house jointly with my partner, who currently has no property or savings. 

I also currently have about £13k of unsecured debt. 

I’m trying to figure out the feasibility of moving at the moment, and if it is feasible, what order things should be done in. 

Do we look at properties first? Do we try to get a DiP? Do I get my house valued by an estate agent? Do I put my house on the market? Should I refresh the decor in my house prior to putting it on the market or getting it valued? Do I need a solicitor right away? 

I’ve seen for example a property valued at £270k. Assuming a 5% (£13500) deposit on a basic mortgage calculator, our salaries should afford this. This would allow me to clear my debts (about £13k) with the remaining equity, and then anything additional from the house sale (anything from £10k-30k?!) would cover any offer we might make above the home report value, along with stamp duty and legal fees? 

I think stamp duty would be around £4k. Not sure what to budget for legal fees, or any additional costs or considerations?

Any advice would be much appreciated.  

You state you have approx 13k of debt but on your other post the amount of debt is 18k. You have been given some great advise on that post 
Are you after a ‘quick fix’ way of paying the debt? moving house really is not the answer

Also you say a 5%deposit but surely you’ll be paying high interest mortgage rates if you do manage to get a mortgage with 5% deposit, normally you need minimum 10% and more likely 15% 
you say your partner has no savings, is that because they also have  debts?

stressedette

@MFWannabe I'm not after a 'quick fix' - it's two separate issues really. We really need to move anyway, if not now then later next year / early 2025. I'm using the £13k figure on this post assuming we wait until my loans at least are paid off and I can start to make a bit of a dent, but acknowledging the best time generally to move is springtime. It may be that we wait until Spring 2025! By which point it will be much less than 13k. But this post was about understanding the financial process of moving, rather than debt help. 

Just because my partner has no savings doesn't automatically mean that he has debts, this is not the case.