Mortgage advice!

Read this link from Martins money saving expert. He has lunched it on his website this week and it is a helpful document.
He talks about all the important details.


http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/mortgages/mortgage-guide


When we went to our mortgage advisor, one thing he mentioned was the credit score. Mortgage lenders are taking this very seriously now a days. If you are like me and have no credit history because you have had no loans etc. then it is hard for them to even trace you for a credit score. However, make sure that you are on the voting register and this means that you are traceable. Also, if you have a store card then it can also make you noticeable. I have a NEXT store card and was told that this was ok.

Also this document explains about saving for extra costs such as solicitors fees, stamp duty fees etc.
Our extra costs are about £2,500 and this includes the survey, solicitors fees and stamp duty. (This was a much lower price than we expected) It is good if you have this money saved before buying your house as well as your deposit.

I hope you find the document useful!

We have been offered a mortgage!

We were contacted on Friday to let us know that we have been offered a mortgage! Its such exciting news and we have found a house that we would very much like to buy!

So the mortgage: You may not know but Virgin money now offer to lend you money in the form of a mortgage. They are new to the market but having researched them, they look very good and hopefully not much chance of them having any money problems - As we know, Mr Branson has a lot of business! Check out the mortgage site at:  http://bank.virginmoney.com/mortgages/?gclid=CInjmOHw-7sCFSP4wgod_AgAig

We have been offered enough for the house we would like to buy!


So the house... We have found a house which needs a little work doing to it, however we are happy to do this and very excited about it! The house was on the market for £139.950 however, we were very lucky to get it for 134.000 - Remember you must always offer lower than the asking price - The worst they can say is no and then you are welcome to offer a higher price.

This price means that we have the 10% deposit that we needed and also more left over for adaptations to the house.
When I know the house is ours I will post some pictures to the blog.

We now have to find a solicitor and apart from that, the mortgage advisor will contact the estate agents to inform them about our mortgage offer and that allows us to get on with our daily lives. Excellent!

Next steps...

So... we have made our next step in the house buying process.

We have found a local mortgage advisor who we went to visit this week. We were advised to go to an all of market advisor and so that's what we chose to do. I am pleased to say that he was very helpful and informed us about mortgages in more detail (To be honest I didn't know much about them before).
We were there for less than an hour and passed over a few details and documents - They always ask you to provide wage slips and bank statements so they can see your overall income.
Some valuable things we learnt were:

•  Although it is very hard to save more than a 10% deposit on your first house, the bigger your deposit the lower your interest rate and mortgage and therefore less for you to pay each month. We are however basing our mortgage on a 10% deposit and that is still okay.

• He also informed us that you must have building insurance on your house and also it would be useful to have critical life insurance as this means that if anyone gets ill then your mortgage will be paid for - Well worth paying for as you never know what will happen!

• He informed us that the house does not belong to you until you receive the keys so even after the long process someone can gazump you as they say (Put in a larger offer).

• Also, after the mortgage advisor has found a suitable mortgage for you, the next step is to find a solicitor to help with the legal process. If you go to a mortgage advisor they will normally recommend one that they have used before.  

When we find or house or have completed any other steps I will write a new post on my blog.

Do you have any tips or information about buying? If you do please share!

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Buying a house for the first time

I thought I would create this blog as i am starting to house hunt for the very first time and thought it would be good to share my experiences with other people and hopefully to find out what other people are experiencing.
So a little bit about myself... My husband and I got married in August 2013 and with his family coming from Nottingham and him being in the military, we decided to base ourselves near my family in Macclesfield Cheshire.
details about the type of house: we are looking for a 3 bedroom house with somewhere to park for under 140,000 - quite a tight budget I know but let the searching begin! :)