A Wedding or a House?

So, a while ago I mentioned that we had some exciting things coming up in our future. One of which was the job, another that is shop related which I will tell you about another time, and a third that I will explain now. This one also explains my mood the other day....

I know I have talked about house hunting before but I'm not sure I have ever explained things fully? My current living situation is just a temporary fix with the parents. My other half and I have been saving up so that we could buy a house. We have managed to save up a nice little nest but both our incomes are quite low, so we were aware that we wouldn't be able to borrow a huge amount from the bank. But our deposit was healthy and we were hoping this would take us a long way.

We decided to have a look at shared ownership schemes. For any that don't know, this is where you buy a percentage of a property and then pay rent for the other percentage. The idea being that you only need a small mortgage but still get on the property ladder. Well we thought we had found the perfect place. It was the only property left on a new development in Frome, the building being a coach house with a 50% shared ownership. We had a look round and we really liked it. We spoke to a mortgage broker and they found a mortgage that was comfortably in our reach and we got a certificate of approval, we applied for the shared ownership and got approved. Everything looked rosy. We reserved the property and told the broker to get the mortgage going, and that's where it all fell down. The mortgage provider turned round and said that they could only give us the mortgage if we put down another 10% deposit, so rather than a 15% deposit (which is what we had) we would need a 25% deposit.

The cost of that extra 10% was basically our wedding budget.

As you can imagine I started to panic a little, so we went and spoke to other mortgage people and got exactly the same answer. So I was faced with the question, a wedding or a house? I know that most of you would think that there was an obvious answer to this. "Buy the house! The wedding is only one day the house is forever" But let me explain a bit further. The budget for our wedding is about £7000 - £8000, which is cheap!! We have already sacrificed a lot of what we wanted to go towards the deposit, and if we used every penny left to get to 25%, we would not have any money left. Not a penny. No money to furnish the new house with a fridge, freezer, washing machine. No money in case the car breaks down. Nothing.

I'm afraid we chose the wedding. We feel that if we save up some more over the next year or two maybe we can start the search again, a new development scheme may be on the go, or our circumstances may have changed so that we are aloud to borrow more.

I still can't help feeling so disappointed in ourselves. I'm embarrassed that I thought it was all do-able. But now we have to search for somewhere to rent, change our mind set and carry on. I guess this was just a practise run. But I'm very sad to not be dreaming of our own home any more. Back to normal posts tomorrow with lots of exciting projects and lovely items for sale.
xx