Just ask Luke on here. Light the mortgage advice beacon!
And, erm, married?
Just ask Luke on here. Light the mortgage advice beacon!
And, erm, married?
First the kids, now this. What a twist.
I bet he doesn't even check his tyres anymore.
Don’t go to your bank they only have their own products and depending on who you bank with their criteria could be dogshit. Best thing to do is ask someone you know who has bought a house who they used and what their experience was. If you have no one like that then Google or ask on Facebook and you will get some recommendations.
Most brokers will tell you what you can borrow and get you a decision in principle for free. Some might charge you a fee to do the mortgage some might not but it’s more about finding someone you are comfortable dealing with.
To be fair it is worth noting some brokers are clowns if you dont have a big deposit though. My wife and I had a smaller deposit and went to a broker highly recommended by friends who advised us we could get a mortgage £50k less than what we got through her bank (Lloyds). Maybe not the most favourable repayments but got us the house we wanted instead of the shithole he presumably made more comission on.
That's just bad brokers more than anything though. In the same way that you can have bad mechanics or bad builders, they tend to be the older guys who have done the job for a long time and for ease use the same few lenders rather than actually doing the best by their customers.
It's not even that hard. Deposit, income and credit dependent the lenders that tend to be able to lend the most money are HSBC, Barclays, Santander, Natwest & Halifax. Most brokers should be able to tell you that straight off the bat.
The commission thing doesn't run true it's normally about 0.4% of the mortgage amount again it varies between lenders but it's not as if say Natwest pay 1% and Santander pay 0.1% they are all vaguely in the same region.
Yeah maybe it was just a case of he couldn't be arsed? Not sure. I would look at brokers again in future when moving but thankfully due to swerving one last time we now have about £50k equity in our house so probably get a lot more favourable offers now.
My broker was flaky as fuck (scruffy, late to meetings, seemingly divorced and alcoholic) but he got the job done for £250.
Had an offer accepted on a house, it’s pretty perfect. Apparently someone offered more than us but the seller said they liked us more, fingers crossed it goes through without much fuss.
House or dog?
Lucky fucker. Can't remember the last time I was shown around by the vendor. 99 times out of 100 it's some pleb estate agent with odd socks on.
My mortgage renewal is up in June. Given the chaos, we now live in, fixed or variable?
Fixed surely. Interest rates are still ridiculously low despite the last couple of “rises” so it’s only going to go one way.
I'd agree with that. One of my variable ISAs went up by a measly 0.1% the other day.
A lot of them have been very busy for the past year so they don’t necessarily need the business at the minute. When that happens they stop competing and prices go up, plus I think they had been factoring in more rate rises which looked like a guarantee three weeks ago. The impending recession could put a stop to that even if inflation is rampant.
I remember we were blanked by Nationwide for a mortgage in 2016 because they had already enough customers in the area. Poetry pricks.
When we moved Halifax - who we had our mortgage with at the time - would only offer us £70 grand or something equally mental. We thought they had left a zero off a number somewhere, but the guy on the phone said "nah, we're just trying to cut back on the amount of mortgages we're issuing at the moment". Stop offering mortgages then, dickheads.
I have to go to the bank next week and withdraw 1,200,000,000.00 dong. Yes, 1.2 billion. Buying our new apartment for cash
May just fill my bath with the notes and go full Scrooge McDuck.....
That's like £40k right?
Buying for cash doesn't usually actually mean turning up with a suitcase stuffed full of notes.
It's funny the amount of people that do though. I bought a car for the wife yesterday afternoon and told the dealership I'd be buying it cash (ie. I don't want your rip-off finance) and he told me they only accept payments above £1,000 by bank transfer. Well fucking duh.
Surely you can spare Mellin a million dong then.
That whole part of the world is just so dodgy I don't think I could ever tolerate living there.
Are you even allowed to own this flat you are buying or does it have to be predominantly owned by the local person? Isn't that what the Thais do with their not at all a scam system?
Probably a better system than the world's rich being allowed to buy up most of London.
Sorry to break it to you lads, but you were probably never going to be buying something from one of Nick Candy's developments [which does raise the wider question as to whether, if Roman's dirty money is no good anymore, then is said same money once removed through high end property deals really much more legit?].
Yeah obviously we were never gonna be competing with fucking billionaires. But they push prices up everywhere.
An open society, whilst obviously not without it's problems, is far better than a closed/controlled one. Always amazed me that you had to get 'Foreign Investment Review Board' approval as a foreigner to buy property in Australia, doesn't seem to have helped them much in terms of property prices. Dark ages shit, like capital controls and everything else that would 'probably be a good thing'. Who was buying everything during the Irish boom? As with virtually everything, domestic demand is the major driving force, not some mythical foreign bastards buying everything [with most of what is bought by said folk almost entirely out of reach to anyone but them anyway].
The same shit's happening in Dublin: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/...rket-1.4579165
We met a mortgage advisor before buying our house and he was trying to get us to buy something for about £350-400,000 which would have been an insane thing to do. He seemed like a retard and his only goal was to get us the biggest mortgage we could possibly get.
As Boydy said, very little domestic. If you have a Chinese or US company willing to buy your whole estate off you to rent out then why would you put each one on the market domestically when you can get away with that? The people running here then (and now) are very lucky we're more like you than the French.
The Irish estate phenomenon is an interesting one, and I don't know to what extent it is replicated elsewhere [Manchester seems to have a lot of flats but I'm not sure how investors really benefit out of those knowing, as I do, people who have bought them on that basis] but aren;t most of the issues raised in that article symptomatic of wider failings in policy, rather than not being strict enough about who you let buy property [on the basis of nationality at least]? Which was actually my original point, and was more about how a corrupt system creates bad outcomes for people [cf John Arne when his wife makes off with all his money/he isn;t allowed on the deeds for his house]. For all I know all those REITs are 'Irish' entities [if they aren't Channel Islands listed ] anyway.
One thing mentioned, which is both interesting and very true [in my view], is about banks and their attitude to lending. Because they fucked it so badly in the 2000s thinking they could cut developers out of the game they broadly point blank refuse to lend on development now, but they can't get enough of mortgage lending, which, as is quite easy to see, creates a problematic/somewhat paradoxical situation. Funnily enough there's no shortage of 'bespoke' shysters all too happy to lend at 10%. Top down meddling isn't the solution, insomuch as it is the problem [also highlighted in that article] in how it has allowed the banking sector to completely capture government policy.
Goes both ways there. So my question to people is always how much do you want to borrow? Then the next thing is to tell them what that could borrow as a maximum and what that would cost.
The thing is a lot of people will try to borrow as much as they physically can. Without sounding like an old man as well a lot of those people are younger they want to have everything the big house, the Range Rover etcetera as it's all a lifestyle thing to them.
Anywhere I've ever been in England has housing estates anyway, are they called somethe else there?
The only other name they have here are 'gated communities' but that's when they're 6 bedroom detached houses.
There's also an element of your money being tied up in property being quite advantageous these days as value is only going one way.
Having cash in the bank is pretty pointless. No interest is made and due to inflation it's always going to be worth less than the day you earned it. I leave enough for emergencies and put the rest into something which will actually earn.
Rich foreigners buying up properties as investments/safe deposits is a symptom of a shit property market (shit economy) rather than a cause, and it's more than likely never ever going away.
Went to see it again yesterday, when we first went it was a rubbish rainy day. Yesterday evening the sun was out and it was lovely and warm. The current owner has the doors at the back open, and it was amazing! Can’t wait.
The sale of my flat should finally complete next week too. Aiming to get in the new place by the end of May/early June if all goes well.