5 Tips for first time home buyers in the buying process

AD. Buying my first home was one of the most monumental, stressful and amazing things I’ve done. There are so many benefits of buying your own home and I’m incredibly proud of becoming a homeowner at such a young age. There's a great number of different hacks for first time buyers. Here’s how I did it, along with some tips for first time home buyers.

_{[Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash]}

Tips for first time home buyers

Money.

The big one! Even though you can get away with a 5% deposit, we wanted to save at least 10% of the house prices we were starting to look at. That way our monthly repayments would be slightly less and it would also be a bigger chunk taken off of our house price. It's also worth taking into life insurance, building reports and consideration solicitor fees... Because you don't want them to bite you on the bum! As we were first time buyers, we also paid for a mortgage adviser who basically helped us with everything & it's something I'd 100% recommend doing if you're a first time home buyer too. She was amazing, especially with regards to finding life insurance deals & all the technical jargon that comes with owning a home. Sometimes you need somebody to dumb things down & tell you exactly how it is.

Finding THE house

Whether it's the first house you see or the fiftieth, I think when you know, you know! Ours was actually only the second house we visited but as soon as pulling into the estate and then onto the driveway, I just knew! I remember saying to Dan before we'd even got into the house that I had an amazing feeling about it & that the house was very 'us'. I found it so easy to visualise us living our life in there and how we could improve the house to not only enhance its' value, but to make it even more suitable for us & to our taste. this gut feeling is so important for first time home buyers.

Never offer the asking price

Come on... This one's a given. We offered a ridiculous £12k under the asking price for our house, which we knew would never get accepted, but it certainly showed that we were interested. This was of course rejected and we offered another two prices for it to get accepted... Still £5k under the asking price, which doesn't seem like a massive amount in the grand scheme of things, but it made a huge difference with our deposit & monthly repayments.

Be prepared for it to take a while

So you've found the house, next comes the waiting. We were advised that since having our offer accepted it would take between 6-8 weeks for us to receive the keys. For us it took a little bit longer, which at the time was the most annoying thing in the world. But now we're moved in and settled I realise that we were making a huge deal out of nothing. It takes as long as it needs and when you're set up with a mortgage for 25 years an extra month or so before moving in is nothing. Using 360 Realty Management can really help streamline the process, ensuring everything stays on track and runs as smoothly as possible.

Don't stress

I know it's really difficult not to stress while buying a house, it's probably the most expensive thing you're ever going to buy, so I totally get it. But please if you're feeling the pressure, take a step back, have a brew & look at things again with a fresh pair of eyes. We had a pretty stressless move, and I really think that's down to buying a house with the right person, at the right time. Granted we did come across a few hiccups along the way with timescales and moving out of our rented house, but overall everything went really smoothly.

Are you a first time buyer? Did you find the buying process stressful at all? What tips for other first time home buyers have you got to de-stress the process?