Monthly Mortgage Repayments

[Angelnurse]

My partner and I have £18,000 to use for a deposit for a house. We earn more than enough money to be given a £180,000 mortgage so with this for a 10% deposit we had been looking at houses in this price range. However, we have been to a mortgage advisor at my bank and discovered that the monthly repayments for this mortgage would be too high for us and so have been looking at lower priced houses. If we shop around for different mortgages is it likely that we could get a hugely different quote and possibly affordable monthly repayments for this amount?

[dance2trance]

Yes indeed. You can shop around for a mortgage like any commodity.

Ignore your bank.

Mine did this to me. So I just looked up a mortgage broker on line and said I have £x and want to spend £Y whats that work out at? They said how much, and I said
anything less costly they said yes, so, I said yes. Wandered round to their office and signed. No problems ever. And it was with a big High Street name!

[boxtops]

Yes, absolutely you can. Look at all the building societies and the mortgage terms - they will all be different, and some will offer preferential rates for first time buyers. Shop around. I've just come to the end of a good 3-year rate - so I wouldn't plan to stay with the same mortgage provider, I might well swap to somewhere else with a good offer.

Depending on how old you are, too, you can have a long duration mortgage - it no longer has to be 25 years only. The longer the mortgage, the longer it takes to pay off, but it can bring down your monthly payments.

If you are a nurse in the NHS (as your username may suggest), don't forget to look at the Health Service Discounts site, too - there can be some good deals on there, both for buying things for your home and for other spending, too.

[sportsnut]

you also have to look at arrangement fees that some brokers or banks want
to charge sometime when you take the arrangement fee into the calculations it can sometimes paint a different picture

[jake-the-peg]

Be a little careful here.

You might find affordable deals with lower repayments for the first few years that then shoot up.

We bought a house 20 years ago on such terms when interest rates were sky high betting that they'd come down (which they did) and it all worked out fine.

However in todays market interest rates have only one way to go - you'd be wise to factor in at least a 0.5%-1% increase in rates in your calculations otherwise you might buy a house and find yourselves struggling to make the payments in a years time