Financing My First Home

In this blog post I wanted to cover everything financial when buying my first home. I did include some of these figures in a past blog post ‘I Bought A House!‘ but I wanted to create a separate post to highlight everything in one place. This previous post was about the whole journey of finding out how much money I could borrow, viewing property, agreeing on a price and every step along the way if you wanted a bit more of a detailed read. I hope you find this post useful and if you are thinking of buying property it might give you an insight into costs to expect.

Mortgage, Legal & Lending

Here is a breakdown of all of the fees associated with arranging the mortgage, legal fees for the conveyancer and the loan itself. I have put these in date order as well so you can see the timeline of the finances. The upfront cost is everything I had to pay to get the keys to the property including legal fees and the deposit. The mortgage total is the loan for the house as well as a fee added by the bank which I will repay over the agreed term. I have also included an overall total in the table. For reference I bought the property for £87000.

Mortgage Broker Fee	£100	02 Sep 2020
Halifax Valuation Fee	£200	08 Sep 2020
Initial Conveyancer Fees	£500	11 Sept 2020
Lifetime ISA Cash Deposit	£21550	20 Oct 2020
Remaining Conveyancer Fees	£408.40	31 Oct 2020
Halifax Mortgage Loan	£65450	05 Nov 2020
Halifax Mortgage Fee (Added to Loan)	£999	05 Nov 2020
Upfront Cost	£22758.40	05 Nov 2020
Mortgage Total	£66449.00	05 Nov 2020
Overall Cost	£89207.40	05 Nov 2020

Conveyancer Fees Breakdown

In the table above you will see two payments to the conveyancers. The initial £500 was for them to begin the work and start the required searches on the property. The remaining fees were invoiced and paid before the completion and handover of keys. I have broken down this total of £908.40 below in this separate table for you to see where this money was allocated.

Land Registry Search Fee	£40
Land Charges Search Fee	£2
Land Registry Fee	£3
Acting Conveyancer Fee	£600
Official Search Package	£204.60
Bank Transfer Fee	£48
Electronic Identification	£4.80
Electronic Storage of File	£6.00
Total Charges	£908.40

Insurance Products

These are two insurance products I chose to put in place. Firstly is life insurance coverage from 1st October onwards (I put this in place in advance of the completion of the purchase) and then the home and contents insurance. The insurance for the property was required before the mortgage funds could be released however as this can be paid monthly or annually I didn’t include it in the upfront costs table at the top of this blog entry.

Legal & General Life Insurance	£14.76	15th October 2020 (+ Monthly)
AXA Home & Contents Insurance	£235.65	05 Nov 2020 (Annual Fee)

Thanks for reading this blog post. Please take into account that I purchased property by myself with no financial aid from family/friends… I also purchased property in a cheaper area of my county to fit within my budget as property prices do vary massively in Pembrokeshire. Another thing to consider was that I wanted to keep my monthly outgoings as minimal as possible to provide myself with greater flexibility in future and not having the pressure of massive overheads. Please let me know if you want to know any other details in the comments and hope you have a great day! Take care and stay safe – Glen.