Understanding Mortgages - First time buyer

[unwashed potato!]

was hoping you helpful lot can give me some advice with this and what my options may be.

I've saved up £15k from last year, and this year hope to be able to get another £15k or so by Christmas giving me £30k. I can borrow from family, though only small, they could increase my deposit to around £38k to £42k.

my partner doesn't have so much, but by christmas we'd hope she can input just under £10k herself.

we currently rent a 3 bed house but were allowed to have other friends live with us, so although the rent is £1.5k per month, we actually pay almost nothing for rent, then just pay the bills between us.

This got us thinking that if we were to be able to buy a house similar to what we rent, we'd actually be making a profit as say it was the exact house we are in now, we'd have a reception room that's unused and another persons input, plus we'd not have agency fees, landlords profit etc that we're paying now by renting.

so we thought to see what our options are with regards to buying a mortgage. i've spoke to 2 big banks over the phone now, and neither offer a mortgage where you are allowed to rent bedrooms out so we'd have to do it unofficially, and unfortunately it wouldn't be taken into account with the options as to how large of a house we can buy.

at the moment, i've gone through the online calculators, and between us, we're only being offered a mortgage of £290k, which is enough for a flat/tiny house. no good for us as ideally we're hoping for a 3 bed place, or at least a 2 bed with a reception room maybe that could be rented out for a year or so.

anyone know what our options are? are we likely to ever find an option that would suit us like this?

 

[unwashed potato!]

Depends on the amount you take as rent

https://www.gov.uk/rent-room-in-your-home/the-rent-a-room-scheme

any idea if this is doubled when the house is shared between 2 people? surely if i get £7.5k per year, she will too? i wonder how this would then work as everyone pays the rent into a house account (in my name only), which is straight away paid to rent, bills etc.

My only advice would be a prenup when you're putting down up to 3x as much as your partner for the deposit alone.

thanks for the advice, but she's already suggested this. she must be planning on leaving me some time before the mortgage is paid

 

[unwashed potato!]

"although the rent is £1.5k per month, we actually pay almost nothing for rent"

£1.5K x 12 = £18K. So he is well over the threshold of £7,500 of HMRC.

we gon't get £18k given to us in rent. it's less, but then between us 2, we pay what i consider to be almost nothing for what we have.

You want to use rental income in your assessment to get a bigger mortgage. Well you should already be declaring the current rental income as extra income so you should have no issues then when it comes to adding it into your mortgage application as it will be on your SA for the past few years, etc.

essentially yes, however we're yet to have a SA as it's not been that long that we've been in this property. a few months. it's also surely impossible to declare an income for a house we've not yet bought and figured out what we can rent out and charge

 

[unwashed potato!]

Couldn't think of anything worse than sharing a house with lodgers , but whatever floats your boat.

i understand how sharing once you're settled may feel off, however i see that houses are expensive, and i see that to buy one i will have to accept having people share that space with me for x amount of years. i've shared for a few years now. it has it's ups and downs, but having cheaper rent to me is such a luxury giving me more disposable income to do whatever i wish with.

Why do you need a 3 bed house for two people?

like the guy above said, rent out rooms. think of it like this. lets say we have a 1 bed house and the mortgage/rent is £900 per month. That's my partner and i paying £900 just us. if we have a 2 bed place the mortgage/rent is say £1200. we can rent out the second room for £580, more even if we rent to a couple, leaving us to pay only £620. 3 bed house, mortgage is lets say £1500, but we can now get £1160 from renting out the rooms, leaving just £340 to be paid between 2 people. makes complete sense to me.