Buying A House - Your Questions Answered!
[ This blog post was kindly sponsored by Experian ]
Today’s post is an exciting one – I’m back with another #ExperianMoneyDiaries post, and this time I’m answering your questions on our house buying process!
I’ve also filmed a Q&A video answering your questions, where I go into the questions in more depth (and also rope Ben in to help me – I thought it would be great to have him there to answer your questions as we went through the process together!).
If you’d like to watch the YouTube video, you can do that HERE – for some more in-depth answers to the questions.
However, I know that some of you prefer to read blog posts rather than watch videos, so I wanted to write up this post for you guys to hopefully give you more of an insight into our whole process.
As I mentioned in the video, I’m in no way a ‘financial advisor’, this blog post and my answers are purely coming from my experience of saving up and buying a home. I really hope you find this post useful – feel free to DM me or comment if you have any other questions, I’d be happy to answer them! I couldn’t answer all your questions but answered the most common / relevant ones!
Let's get started!...
How long did the offer take from offer to completion? We were SUPER lucky, our process from offer to completion was only six weeks which I think is pretty much unheard of and very fast (we struggled to get our heads around it as we were told to expect around three months and were still saving up the last of our deposit!).
What are your suggestions for helping get approved for a mortgage? There are two key things I’d recommend that I found invaluable to our process…
1.) Getting a mortgage advisor!– This is completely up to personal preference but I really felt like I had no idea where to start, our mortgage advisor was amazing and held our hand through the process. He made sure that everything went through smoothly and took a lot of the pressure off us, we paid £300 for our advisor and he was worth every penny in my opinion!
2.) Sign up to Experian!– This was actually the first thing that our mortgage advisor told us to do, and we signed up for Experian around 4-5 months before we started looking for a house. Both of us didn’t have *great credit scores, and Experian was super useful in helping us build up our score, which in the end allowed us to be approved for a mortgage.
I personally had a couple of missed payments from uni (you never expect these things to come back on you but they do!), so I found Experian invaluable to our house buying process, we couldn’t have done it without it!
How long did the offer take from offer to completion? We were SUPER lucky, our process from offer to completion was only six weeks which I think is pretty much unheard of and very fast (we struggled to get our heads around it as we were told to expect around three months and were still saving up the last of our deposit!).
What was the first step once you had the money saved? I loosely covered this above, but seek a mortgage advisor to help with the process, sign up to Experian to check your credit score is as high as it can be before applying for a mortgage - then start looking, eek!
Did you get help from family? Yes but not a lot! As I mentioned we started looking before we saved up all of our deposit, so what we borrowed was small and just helped us cross the finish line. Ben borrowed a small sum from his dad to help him with his share, and my Dad very kindly paid for our solicitor fees (which I *think* were around £1,400-£1,600 for everything).
We managed to save £17,500 each ourselves which covered our half of the deposit and stamp duty. I am SO incredibly proud of how hard we worked, how much we achieved and saved!
What criteria did you have when looking for a home? We wanted somewhere close to a station so Ben could commute to London for his job, ideally with a nice garden and 3 bedrooms (I wanted a spare bedroom for our friends / family to use when staying over), and a room I could use as an office. We found our perfect house and it came in under the budget we had set ourselves of £350,000 which we were really happy with!
Did you ever want to give into the temptation of spending whilst saving? YES! It's hard work, but TRUST ME when you reach your goal it's SO worth it! Every night out / meal / ASOS order you miss out on, all become SO worth it when you pick up the keys to your house!
How did you know what you can afford? Our mortgage advisor advised us that we could borrow 4 / 4 and a half times our combined wages so that’s how we knew what our max limit was to borrow, we decided not to push it to our highest limit though as I’m self-employed and would rather be comfortable than struggle with money. We’re hoping that our next house will be our forever home so that’s where we’ll push it a little more (although hopefully we’ll have some good equity in the house by then too!).
How long did you save for and did you make any changes to your spending habit? We were “loosely saving” for around a year but kept dipping in and out of our savings and not taking it very seriously, so we sat down last summer and a serious “okay let’s *actually* do this” chat, and from when we started saving to completion it was around 18 months. We saved up really, really hard and were lucky we could put chunks of money away, my advice would be to set yourself a total goal that you want to save and a time scale and go from there.
Don’t kill yourself saving every penny as you won’t have a life and will resent the process, we stuck to having a date night once a month where we’d do something nice for each other. If I wanted to buy some new clothes, I’d sell old ones to fund buying them.
I think it comes to just prioritising what you really want, if you REALLY want the house then for a couple of years that might involve some sacrifices, BUT just remember that it’s not forever, and the result will taste much, much sweeter than any quick fix a shopping spree / fancy dinner can bring you!
There we have it guys – my post on our house buying process, and answering your questions! I really hope this post was helpful and you can take away some tips for your process, I’d love to know how you guys are getting on and whether you’re looking to buy a house / have recently bought!
Much love xo
*This post was sponsored by Experian, all opinions and images are my own, we found Experian invaluable to our house buying process and I hope you do too!
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