Owning your own home

Mine was three months worth statements & payslips but it's substantially more if you do contract work (as one of my friends found out recently).

They have access to your banking records via your credit report. This goes back 6 years, and show your month end balances and overdraft limits.

@rhowe

how many months/years bank statements did you have to provide the mortgage company? I've been notoriously bad with money in the past and I'm a bit worried about that.

1 month, although their requirements were really bizarre.

They wanted a full month's statement and my most recent payslip. I took that to mean my last monthly statement, which ran 28th to 28th or so and my last payslip which was paid in on the 30th after the end of my last bank statement.

So, sent those and they said they needed to see my pay going in on the statement. I said that would mean waiting 3 weeks for my next statement, so they said can't you just run one off online banking and email it to them? That sounded comically forgable, but I did it anyway from the 1st to the 30th. Then they came back and said "but it's online so why did you only do that month? Please do it from the start of last month to today".

What a rigmarole.

Same bullshit with Mrs rhowe's statements.

Basically I could've just run a PDF off each of our online banking interfaces, emailed it over and that'd have been the end of it. To use 'official' paper statements, I had to get the accountant at work to certify a copy, scan that in and email it. Much crazy, many delay.