Owning your own home

Good to know you have local amenities.

E14 appears cheap... just found pretty much my dream house, don't think I have time to buy it sadly (other plans on the horizon).
Very frustrating.
Very 1st world problem.

What are the options for a couple with jobs, an okayish deposit (£35-40k), but terrible credit? I'm guessing "Fuck off back to Canada!"?

^not necessarily. You could speak to a mortgage broker and see what they say

Have you seen your UK credit score and know it to be terrible, or are you making an assumption?

the greater the deposit, the less credit score matters i imagine. speak to a mortgage broker - joes flat will be up for grabs soon!

also, can you lend me 5 grand?

Yeah this. Also, if it was a while ago and you show a consistent saving history to make that deposit, they will like you.

can i get my 5 grand before hippy please, i did ask first.

Give me 10 minutes, my spread-betting position is about to pay off

Credit is bad. If scores run from 0 - 100, I would say a safe bet is a score of 0. Deposit is not from saving.

Should I talk to Jeez?

I'm sure debt could be taken care of by next year, but with fucking prices going up 24% a year, it's the equivalent of throwing away around 10k of 40k deposit (and, obviously, paying 25% more). The entire thing is mental.

I'm just going to buy a fuck load of blow.

Is it just me or does that sound dirty?

#midgets

Actually, I just clocked the savings could be used to pay debt, and the money that would go to the debt could just go back to the savings.

This is how good I am with money.

Speak to a mortgage advisor/IFA, all we can do is guess.

My guess: you have a decent deposit, if the repayments are affordable given your income then they will want to lend you the cash.

If that's not the case I will burn your house down for getting my hopes up, Dammit. Then we both can be depressed and homeless.

Anyone have any advice on who to speak to re: "advisor/IFA"?

You'd make good money pretty quickly... a middle class drug dealer would be all the rage.

So... we are looking at a typical small victorian terrace, with the three bedrooms upstairs and a downstairs bathroom at the back of the house through the kitchen.

Except, the owners have converted the third room (which is accessible only via the second bedroom) to a bathroom too. I don't understand this, as you still need to have a bathroom downstairs for guests in the front bedroom, or reverse the stair case and create a corridor to the upstairs bathroom by making the bedroom smaller.

My immediate thought is to convert the bathroom back to a bedroom and research suggests that will improve the value of the house? Do people really hate downstairs bathrooms that much? And how much does it cost to cap all the plumbing and convert a bathroom to a normal room?

^ where will your servants sleep?

For mortgage brokering, these guys have been good for us and some friends and family: http://www.scalesporter.co.uk/

Sleep? Why would they need sleep? They sleep when they're dead.

Thanks! We'll send them a message.

My house has this, it was very common at the time.

I thought it'd be a massive pain but it's really not, you hardly even notice it unless you're planning to rent out one of the rooms.

What would be the point in turning it back to into a room? It's not really a bedroom as you've got to walk through another so it's viewed as a "+1" or walk in wardrobe.

When I was looking to buy we turned down several decent enough houses because they had downstairs bathrooms, they're rubbish & impractical.

Credit is bad. If scores run from 0 - 100, I would say a safe bet is a score of 0.

Definitely talk to a proper financial adviser but in my experience; debt isn't a bad thing so long as you can show you've been paying it off, if you've been naughty & missed a few payments it might be a different story. Remember they want someone that they can make money out of, paying interest on a few credit-card debts makes you a sure fire profit (so long as your record doesn't have lots of red boxes on it).

For reference, our old place was the same general space; the previous owners had flipped the stairs to make it 3 properly independent bedrooms. The bathroom downstairs does invariably put people off, but I think that would be offset by the more usable upstairs layout. The whole bathroom downstairs thing is a bit of a puzzle to me. There are just as many advantages as there are disadvantages, but most people only seem to see the downside.

For what it's worth, our various neighbours had all of the different possible arrangements, and ours sold for the most.