Yet another self cert question

Toto

Hi everyone, I'm thinking about buying a house which has come onto the market recently. we are currently renting and happy here, not desperate to move right now but this one house has got me thinking about it. great area and not a bad price at all.

Anyway, our situation is that we sold our business at the back end of last year and have roughly 20% deposit in the bank (based on the price of this particular house). Now as a result, both hubby and I are individually self employed, we both do contract work without an actual contract (music industry and it's the norm). However, I'm off work recovering from a surgery and as I have a pretty nasty credit history dating back to when we first started the business and we had some major cashflow issues, it's probably best for hubby to apply for any mortgage alone. Our finances aren't linked, we don't have any joint accounts or utilities so I imagine he won't suffer too much on the back of my file. he does have one old default though which I guess still sets him in the not so prime sector.

We do bring in a decent income, although I'm not entirely sure at the moment how to calculate that. His daily rate is £275 which we can prove by recent invoices, but we don't yet have any tax information to prove that. We do have a copy of accounts from the business but as we don't own that anymore it must be fairly useless. I do know what we'll bring in as a household and we can well afford the mortgage we'll need and I certainly don't want to over inflate figures. I will say that the house is on the market for £365000, but seeing as we know the vendor they have said they'll take £330,000 we have £70,000 in the bank

So, having searched around the net a bit I'm scratching my head over quite which box we fit into. I realise we would need to speak to a whole of market broker, but how do I go about finding one, a decent one? I know to look for a no fee deal but other than that I haven't really got a clue. I'd love to hear any ideas from you before I just forget it all and just carry on saving... ooh but I do love this house and could see us in it for many many years.

homer_j_3

How long have you been running yourself as self employed in this role?
What is your annual net profit based on current earnings?

UK007BullDog

Firstly you need to sort out your finances. With the credit crunch in full swing even the self cert lenders might want to have proof of your incomes.

Plus I suggest you pull 2 credit file reports on both of you and take those with you to the broker.

How to find a good broker? Well, you could ask family and friends. If no luck you call up those local to you and ask these three important questions:

1. Whole of market? Access to all lenders?
2. Registered with the FSA or via a network? Then ask for their FSA reg number and check on www.fsa.gov.uk/register
3. How are they going to get paid?