Mortgages are available, provided you meet lending criteria.

The single most important attribute lenders are looking for is affordability.A key part of our role is to demonstrate that you can comfortably afford your mortgage.

• In general you should look at not borrowing more than 4.5 times your gross income. The smaller the mortgage, the better!
• You will also need savings of between 12% and 14% of the purchase price.

1.Prudent Financial management must be evident

• Steady build up of Savings
• History of regular Rent payments
• Strong current accounts .
• Overdraft facilities whilst acceptable will not help an application
• A minimum of personal borrowing clearly helps an application .Short term borrowings may significantly limit your maximum mortgage facility level.
• You must be seen to operate reasonable spending habits( Yes lenders look closely at how you spend your money)

2. Employment must be secure

• Lenders will generally only consider full time permanent positions.
• Contracts of indefinite duration with State bodies are also considered secure.
• In non state bodies some long term contract type positions may satisfy lenders if it can be established that the contract will continue well into the future. ( Approvals here are rare)

Other factors which underwriters consider include:

• Length of current employment
• The sector in which you are employed? Is it especially exposed in recession?
• Is your job construction related?

3. Income

• Applications from single applicants with income less than 25k will very rarely meet lending criteria.
• For joint applications the typical minimum income is 40k
• The primary focus is on basic wages with only a small percentage of bonus or commission payments being taken into account.?

· 4. Credit history

• · Do you have loans?Have they been maintained up to date.
• · Have you a clean credit history?
• · Do you have large credit card balances?

5 .Life style issues

· Lenders look closely at your current account statements

• · Are you overspending on luxuries such as eating out to often?
• · Other imprudent spending such as on line gambling will not help
• · Have you money left over at the end of each month?
• · How would the accounts look if a monthly mortgage was applied

Gifts for deposits

Very often parental gifts form part of the deposit.However lenders still like to see some element of savings .For example if the 8% deposit was 20 k, it would help to have savings of around 10 k and a gift for the balance.

Summary

Hopefully this gives you a good feel for what are the basic lending criteria.They are not written in stone but there must be no doubt that you can afford the repayments.

It may well be that you do not qualify at the moment.Perhaps your savings are not adequate or you are on probation.Even so it wont be long before you will be ready ,so please keep careful control of your finances in the run up to an application at a later date.