When it comes to buying your first home (or your second or third for that matter), you can feel like you’re stumbling your way through it. Helpfully, most of us didn’t learn about mortgages, interest rates, legal fees and stamp duty while at school…
Having experienced navigating the minefield of mortgages, we thought we’d bring together some useful information to help you.
There are tons of mortgage calculators online to assist with figuring out your property budget, what you can borrow, monthly payments and how much you’ll owe overall. With so many options, it can be difficult to know where to start.
We’ve tried out a number of mortgage calculator options, so you don’t have to. Below are some of the tools we found most useful!
Contents
What should my property budget be? – Barclays Mortgage Calculator
Barclays have a whole range of mortgage calculators to help you get the information you need. Firstly, what you think you can afford and what a mortgage company will actually let you borrow could be quite different figures. If you’re at the very start of your house hunting journey, you may want to try their How much can I borrow? calculator. For this you’ll need to know:
- Your income
- The income anyone else who would be buying the house with you i.e., your partner
- Any regular spending including repaying credit and store cards, loans, overdrafts, and your pension
- Deposit amount
Entering all this information will help you to figure out what your property budget should be as you start your house hunt.
What can I borrow?
We’d recommend trying a few different calculators to see what you can borrow as the results may vary. The banking ones, in particular, will be more tailored to what that bank specifically would be willing to lend you.
For example, we entered the same details into three different calculators and the figures came out as being able to borrow £230,902, £247,000 and up to £234,000.
Along with the Barclays calculator we mentioned above, here are a few other options you can try:
- Which mortgage calculator – this was quick and easy but gave us our lowest results
- HSBC calculator – all you enter is your annual income and it will instantly tell you how much you can borrow
- Santander calculator – this is a much longer form, but by entering more information your results should be more accurate
With a few figures to hand, you should have a good idea about what you can borrow, and you can add this to your deposit amount to get your property budget too.
What will my monthly payments be? – The Money Advice Service
If you’re trying to figure out what your monthly costs would be really quickly (5 seconds), this mortgage advice calculator by the Money Advice Service is a great option. All you need it the cost of the home you are looking at and how much of a deposit you are putting down. This will give you a figure for your monthly repayments and you can ensure it’s precise by adjusting the mortgage term and interest rate if you know these.
How much will I owe? – Money Saving Expert
This basic mortgage calculator from Money Saving expert calculates your mortgage cost per month as well as the cost over the life of the mortgage which includes fees and interest. To find out this information you’ll need to know your mortgage debt, term and interest rate.
It was quick and easy to complete, although the results may seem scary to first time buyers. For example, a £200,000 mortgage, for 25 years with a 3.5% interest rate would mean you repaying £300,477 in total.
While these figures may seem overwhelming, if you focus more on your monthly payments it will seem much more manageable.
Bringing it all together
We hope these mortgage calculator options will help you to get the information you need. Leave us a comment below if you know of any other useful tools, or to share your experience of buying your first home.
When you’ve found the perfect home for you, be sure to check out our interior design ideas too!
