Once you’ve got at least a 5% deposit, you’ll find banks will be prepared to lend you just about anything. So unless you really like baked beans, it’s not really a question of how much can you borrow, but what you can afford. To give yourself a ballpark, enter your household income into our handy borrowing calculator.
Here’s another calculator to help you work out how much you can afford to borrow.
To give you an idea of what you can afford in real terms, try setting up a bank account so that your savings (+rent) equate to your probable mortgage repayments. You’ll find out pretty quickly if you can cope or not.
The more you have for a deposit the less you’ll pay in interest. 10% is ideal, but we can work with as little as 5% savings in the bank. Borrowing over 90% is trickier and gets expensive.
If you don’t have a wad of cash in the bank, you could use a limited guarantor or to borrow enough for a deposit through a second mortgage. The guarantee is usually against a parent’s property but we can also use term deposits as the security.