Mortgages

[flumperino]

Hi - looking for some general advice.

For a first time buyer, are there many/any 95% mortgages about?

My gut tells me to hang on for another 6 months, save a bit more, wait for prices to (hopefully) drop a bit more, and wait for more reasonable mortgages with more reasonable rates to make a comeback.

Now that, as ever, is based on lots of ifs and buts. In addition, having rented through the entire 'boom' for most of this decade, I have pretty much run out of patience with waiting to buy, and want my own place asap.

Any advice?

Thanks

[Q-Ball]

Im in the same boat mate, but have been living with parents instead of renting.

HSBC are offering a 90% mortgage at the moment, however i have been doing a bit of research and discovered offset mortgages, which seem to be the way forward.

Also, having read an article on houseprice falls around the country, it really depends on where you want to buy. IMO, anywhere other than london won't fall too much, and now is as good a time as any. average houseprice is £150K. In reality, its £125K if you take away london. £300K is the average in london.

If you don't go for a tracker, get it fixed for as long as possible. Rates are at an all time low but when they go up, they wil shoot up.

Book yourself an appointment with your bank just to get the gist of how much you can borrow, and then start looking around to see what that can get you.

HTH
q

[flumperino]

Thanks man.

I was thinking of calling my own bank to see if they'll do me any favours as a long term customer (doubt it, but worth the phone call).

From what I can see, there aren't really any 95% jobbies around at the moment.

[Swiss Tony]

The government do some scheme called national homebuyers, they lend you up to 25% of the value of your home provided your income is less than 60K a year, then after ten years (or anytime in between) you either sell the house, keep your 75% of the profit and they keep theirs or you buy out the other 25%. Most home buyers have stopped the easy start deals now in favour of the government scheme as it's no cost or financial burden on them.

PS Don't go for a mortgage about 80% if you can help it as the rates will be awful.

Swiss

[flumperino]

Found a place that does 95% mortgages with a rate of 6.99%.

The rate is quite high, but not actually that much higher than places that do 90% LTV, whose rates are usually around 6.5%. I'm quite tempted. I know I could wait another 6/12 months and save up enough for a bigger deposit to get a 90% LTV, but if I wanted a mortage right now, the 6.99% doesn't seem too bad.

Anyway, here's a question: if I take out a mortgage solely in my name, when it gets to signing deeds, the place can be signed/owned by both myself and my wife, yes? You don't have to be named on the mortgage to be named on the deeds?

[wakadoo]

just to add my twopenneth..

make sure to ask how much the repayments will be from 15 year to 20 to 25 years..

i took mine over 25 and after a few month worked it out over 20 year and was amazed how little the diff was (about 10% more on a monthly payment)..so i quickly went and altered it.

[wtaylor]

I cant see the rates shooting up anytime soon as we are still very much in a recession. If they did shoot up 1%+ there would be uproar as meny people are strugging as they are now, besides after what happened in the euro elections it would not be favourable to do this.
The bigger deposit yo can get the better, can you not get ur parents to release some capital from their house to help, that way you could get a far lower intrest rate and pay them back monthly and prob still save money.....Its what I did

I was offered 6.75% fixed for 3 yrs, for 30 yr mortgage
I "borrowed" £15k plus my savings for a deposit making it a 80% mortgage, both payements still cheaper than than I would have been paying at original offer

[flumperino]

Thanks for the opinions. Borrowing a substantial amount of money isn't an option unfortunately.

Which is why, after waiting years for 'the right time', I'm thinking 'fuck it' and am just going to go for it.