Six months savings when applying for mortgage?

Shelga

Another question Do all lenders require your bank statements and proof of regular savings for 6 months? I have a decent enough deposit but it's a combination of money I saved previously, and a gift. Haven't been saving much the last 6 months.

Perfectly fine/understandable if the 6 months thing is required everywhere, gives me the kick up the arse I need to get serious about this!

skywayavenue

AIB are accepting 3 months off us as we have saved 2.5 times what our mortgage repayments will be each month. I suppose every bank is different, and every person in that bank is different again!

D3V!L

With your 10 or 20 percent deposit , what sort of other amount of savings are banks usually looking for ?

We've just started what will be a year of savings and we're hopefully being gifted the deposit.

tailgunner

skywayavenue wrote: »

AIB are accepting 3 months off us as we have saved 2.5 times what our mortgage repayments will be each month. I suppose every bank is different, and every person in that bank is different again!

Similar story for us with AIB, we'd only been saving for four months. Be interested to hear about other banks.

tailgunner

D3V!L wrote: »

With your 10 or 20 percent deposit , what sort of other amount of savings are banks usually looking for ?

We've just started what will be a year of savings and we're hopefully being gifted the deposit.

They want to see that your current monthly savings (plus rent, if applicable) will cover the mortage repayments. They also stress test for potential increases in interest rates - up to about 7% in our case with AIB.

skywayavenue

D3V!L wrote: »

With your 10 or 20 percent deposit , what sort of other amount of savings are banks usually looking for ?

We've just started what will be a year of savings and we're hopefully being gifted the deposit.

They just want to see regular savings and that you aren't dipping into the savings each month. We were gifted some of our deposit too so it was just regular savings we needed to show.

GingerLily

In general you would want rent plus savings to be greater then your stressed mortgage repayments for the last 6 months.
If you don't have this you may have something else that the bank likes the look of but I expect of you've not saved money and don't pay sufficient rent then being gifted your deposit isn't going to be good enough.

We didn't have great savings ourselves as we'd just paid for our wedding, so they looked at the 6 months before the wedding, but it took longer then it would have otherwise.

CalRobert

I never really understood the question, to be honest. The bank asked "how long have you been saving" and I just said "umm, I don't know, really, I just don't spend all my money so I have more now than I used to". Seemed to work OK but their questions were generally asinine (and a bit infantilizing)

stimpson

CalRobert wrote: »

I never really understood the question, to be honest. The bank asked "how long have you been saving" and I just said "umm, I don't know, really, I just don't spend all my money so I have more now than I used to". Seemed to work OK but their questions were generally asinine (and a bit infantilizing)

I had a similar experience. I said the current deposit rates didn't warrant the hassle of setting up a savings account. As long as we could show we had capacity for the repayments they were happy.

CalRobert

stimpson wrote: »

I had a similar experience. I said the current deposit rates didn't warrant the hassle of setting up a savings account. As long as we could show we had capacity for the repayments they were happy.

Savings accounts are a joke. The best you can hope for is about 1%, and not from any Irish bank (figures).

Also really hard to open one if you have US citizenship thanks to Fatca, which affects a not-tiny percentage of the population.

Michael D Not Higgins

CalRobert wrote: »

I never really understood the question, to be honest. The bank asked "how long have you been saving" and I just said "umm, I don't know, really, I just don't spend all my money so I have more now than I used to". Seemed to work OK but their questions were generally asinine (and a bit infantilizing)

These are the sorts of basic questions the bank need to ask to separate the people applying for mortgages into a rough grouping of
a) people who can and are saving
b) people living month to month or on credit

It may seem infantilising but I bet we'd be surprised to see the kinds of people who think they can get a mortgage without being able to demonstrate any financial common sense.

CalRobert

Michael D Not Higgins wrote: »

These are the sorts of basic questions the bank need to ask to separate the people applying for mortgages into a rough grouping of
a) people who can and are saving
b) people living month to month or on credit

It may seem infantilising but I bet we'd be surprised to see the kinds of people who think they can get a mortgage without being able to demonstrate any financial common sense.

Sure but it was weird to have to justify myself. "I went from 20 to 35 grand in the last year but I don't have a savings account. You'll notice that my balance was stagnant for two months - I had a baby and those things are expensive! This was all while making rent payments equal to what would be the payments on a 320,000 mortgage, so can I please get a damn 230,000 mortgage?"

The hemming and hawing and general condescension on the part of Irish banks (who have shown themselves to be incompetent with finances) was more than slightly frustrating. Maybe they don't like that most of my money is in N26 because I don't like supporting criminals (see also: trackers)