Buying a house - first steps

15k!? shit the bed that’s near enough our deposit again

sorry i read my spreadsheet wrong, it was closer to 10k

it will obviously depend on what you’re buying. bear in mind our stamp duty was nearly 6k

Finding the whole process so odd. Walk into somebody else’s home for 5 minutes then make a rational decision whether you want to spend the most amount of money you’ve ever had to live in it for potentially the rest of your life. I spend longer deciding which Co-op rectangular pizza I want to eat.

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People say it’s stressful, but I didn’t find it that bad a process. I was possibly too laid back though, I forgot to transfer the money to the solicitor on the day the purchase was going through, so that led to a frantic visit to the bank.

Only advice I would give is that at some point the solicitor will ask for a grand or something to do some necessary task that they did not tell you about, so be prepared for that.

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TOP TIP: to avoid paying stamp duty you can steam off the stamp duty paid on other houses and use some glue to apply it to your own!

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ah right, just used the .gov calculator and looks like ours will be under a grand, was panicking a bit

I’d recommend if possible doing a second viewing on a house you like with someone you trust like a parent or someone. They can sometimes see things you’re not looking at or are just better for general chit chat while you look. We found that helpful but may not be feasible.

Have you used a help to buy ISA. not sure on the details but might be worth looking into it and getting some tasty tax payer bonus money for your deposit.

the whole thing is really confusing and daunting process (well, i found it so) so really don’t feel silly asking questions

bear in mind that conveyancers charge extra to process these (it’s a small fee, but worth bearing in mind) and also stuff like leasehold properties

we’re in the process of plowing our seperate deposit money through 2 different HtB ISAs but you can only pay in £200 a month so it won’t be a vast amount of tasty bonus £s

Not sure what if it’s the same outside London, but DON’T DO THIS.

A property only gets posted up on Rightmove/Zoopla after it’s been offered to buyers who have signed up with the estate agents.

in my experience, estate agents >>>>> solicitors. but shit estate agents who dont care are the absolute worst, so normal estate agents >>>>> solicitors >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> shit estate agents who dont care

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plus survey costs

Yep this is the case definitely. Both our purchases we viewed before they went up on Rightmove. It’s a pain but it helps to be registered and viewing with EAs

Will estate agents get pissed off if we sign up with no real intention to buy immediately, like we want to view places to get a sense of the market/how realistic our budget/area is/what a good deal looks like but, barring something too good to pass up appearing, we probably won’t be offering until september time

been getting loads of weird facebook ads for property management courses recently, including Robbie Fowler’s Property Academy

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We registered with a few agents and not one of them contacted us when new properties came on. Absolute shower. Most of the viewings at the time (autumn 2015) were for open house anyway so you can only see them on certain days and with 50 other people. And no, this was not that London, but home counties so not a million miles off.

Found this page really useful throughout the process:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/mortgages/house-buying-guide

Our mortgage broker was great, like @plasticniki we got our mortgage from some random building society halfway across the UK because she managed to find us a good deal.

Think about furniture costs too if you’re renting furnished ATM

Luckily my dad’s moving in with his gf this summer too so between them we should be able to blag enough spares to get by, thanks for the link

If estate agents are so shit that they don’t send you stuff through, then they’re going to be even worse at putting stuff up on Rightmove.

nah they dgaf, they;ll just send you very occasional emails of properties that are nothing like what you said you were interested in

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