The 3.5 x Salary ideal - ever realistic again?

dannyboycey

Snaggles wrote: »

There are only two high street mortgage lenders who are still using income multiples as a deciding factor in their mortgage assessments. And even for those, affordability by far the more important factor.

Really? Affordability is determined by your income minus your credit commitments!! Sorry, I don't believe you.

pollyanna24

ringo_24601 wrote: »

I bought my first home 18 months ago and live in hertfordshire/close to london.. our mortgage is 3x our joint income

It is possible!

Cor blimey!! Are you me? Heehee. Me and bf bought our house just over 2 years ago in South Herts (Watford) / close to London for x3.35 our income (we saved up a nice deposit).

I am now wifey (not on paper though) who is popping out an ankle biter in 5 months time. Our way around it is to save money! Simple as. Mortgage still needs to get paid. But we should be able to do it on bf's salary and my maternity until I go back to work without dipping into our savings, so it's not impossible.

That's why I don't think house prices (for a decent 2/3 bed house - maybe they should for a 1 bed flat) should go down to x3.5 a single salary. People need to save and realise that buying a house is the biggest financial committment they are likely to ever make. It ain't cheap, but that's life!

Lotus-eater

Nationwide's website says they will still offer me 4 and a half times my wage? We seem (imho) to have reached about the bottom of the mortgage fall off. What happens from now I can't predict, I honestly can't, I can see it both getting worse and better.

pollyanna24

Lotus-eater wrote: »

Nationwide's website says they will still offer me 4 and a half times my wage? We seem (imho) to have reached about the bottom of the mortgage fall off. What happens from now I can't predict, I honestly can't, I can see it both getting worse and better.

That's the thing. My mortgage is with Nationwide and they offered me and bf so much money. The main thing was we were sensible and only took what we thought we could afford.

dannyboycey

Lotus-eater wrote: »

Nationwide's website says they will still offer me 4 and a half times my wage?

That's a fairly sensible multiple for a single income though.

pollyanna24

Is it? Fair enough. As long as the person taking it knows that they can afford it.

clobber_2

Well quite. The banks are still offering ludicrous amounts to some, if we took what was on offer we would be living in a ten bedroom pile which we couldn't afford to heat because of the crippling mortgage repayments.

phil_b_2

pollyanna24 wrote: »

That's why I don't think house prices (for a decent 2/3 bed house - maybe they should for a 1 bed flat) should go down to x3.5 a single salary. People need to save and realise that buying a house is the biggest financial committment they are likely to ever make. It ain't cheap, but that's life!

I agree. Why should good 3-bed houses come down to an affordable amount for average Joe? If you want the good things in life you need to be bringing home the good money.

I'm sure there will be lots of ok flats etc knocking around for lower income people, and plenty of decent houses for the average folk so they can afford a home, but I dont think it is realistic for everyone to expect a nice grand family home. There are plenty of people earning well above average money around to buy those, along with their BMW's and Mercs.

T'is life.

3under3

Back to my original post the 3.5 x salary was for the main earner with 1 x the lower earner when my parents bought. It seems now that 3.5 joint is the only hope now for getting a house. To buy the house my parents started with you'd be looking at 5 x joint these days with a decent deposit.

Lotus-eater

Timing, its all about timing. When I bought my first house 10 years ago, we were cautious and didn't borrow the max we could, nor did we buy the biggest house we could. If we had have done, we would have made alot more from house prices than we did.
Then it was good to max out a mortgage, now its madness. Yet still my family can't see it and one is at the present moment doing exactly that. I worry, but I'm keeping my nose out