How to buy?

fistfulofsteel

Is it worth me trying to get a mortgage when my income is only around £500-700 per month from self employment, received in USD not GBP? I also receive £1000 in benefits/child maintenance which will both end in 2027. I can afford to buy the property outright but would ideally like to unlock money in a LISA. Would I be better off buying with my non-LISA cash savings and accepting I'll have to pay a penalty if I later run out of money to live on and have to draw on the LISA?

Follow up question: how do I pass AML checks (I only recently learned these are a thing) if I've moved my cash savings every year for 20 years to get better interest rates and not kept any details of closed accounts? Is it possible to recreate the paper trail somehow? The money is mostly in cash ISAs.

Bigphil1474

Go to a mortgage broker and see what they can do. I expect if you keep the mortgage low so your LTV is low, then you should get something. Just needs a calculation between the extra cost and what you might lose from your LISA. 

AML checks can be a pain if you regularly move money around. If you can't find any records of closed accounts then you are probably a money launderer and won't be able to buy a house . You must be able to identify which institutions you had your money with and obtain statements showing the money moving in and out. You only need to cover the money being used to make the purchase, not all your personal wealth.

Herzlos

You're probably going to need to put a lot of your own cash in, because a mortgage lender is only going to lend you up to about 4.5x your salary assuming no other debts/outgoings, which if you took the lower £500/month figure would be about £27k, which is bordering on the bottom end of what mortgage lenders will consider offering. You should get a pretty decent rate given the low LTV if you can find a willing lender. 

If you've got the cash to buy outright I'd go down that route because it'll save you a lot of hassle.

From the AML checks you'll just need to provide a paper trail of where the money has been for however many years they want it, though 6 years is about as long as most places keep records. You can always ask the institutions you likely held accounts with for any records. You'll need to speak to the solicitor doing the house purchase for advise on what they'd need to see, though in your case it'd be worth speaking to them before starting the house buying process. 

fistfulofsteel

I've managed to get through to a human at nationwide and they claim they'll send me proper statements of accounts I've had with them in the past, so hopefully that will resolve the paper trail issue.

fistfulofsteel

The promised statements have not materialized. So I have no record of the money I want to use for the purchase being in my possession before the end of 2024. Is there any way I can force Nationwide to give me a record of accounts I used to hold with them? I've twice been told by customer service agents that they'll send me statements, only for nothing to arrive.

MysteryMe

What timescale did they give you?

fistfulofsteel

MysteryMe said:

What timescale did they give you?

10 working days. That was 10 working days ago.

Bigphil1474

Maybe give them a few more days for snail mail to reach you?

user1977

fistfulofsteel said:

The promised statements have not materialized. So I have no record of the money I want to use for the purchase being in my possession before the end of 2024.

Has anyone asked you for that information? Often solicitors will only be looking back a matter of months.

fistfulofsteel

user1977 said:

fistfulofsteel said:

The promised statements have not materialized. So I have no record of the money I want to use for the purchase being in my possession before the end of 2024.

Has anyone asked you for that information? Often solicitors will only be looking back a matter of months.

I was assuming they would want to look back as the savings I'm using for the house will be more than 10 times my current annual income and haven't been added to recently. Most of the money has been held for more than 10 years. I can prove that I had about half the amount in a different ISA in 2019 but have no paperwork for the accounts it moved between from 2019 to 2024. Will that be enough?