Save or get a mortgage?

The current market probably confounds many consumers, should you be saving in order to have a bigger deposit in the belief that the property market has bottomed out? Or do you buy now in the belief that the market has bottomed out and that any potential equity loss is worthwhile?

I met with an economist yesterday who shall remain nameless, but he made an excellent point, if you are buying a house to stay in yourself then really what you are doing is giving up future earnings in order to obtain an asset today, if that asset price goes down then it means that potentially you sacrificed a portion of your future earnings that you didn’t have to but most importantly it was all based on future earnings, and because that is somewhere down the line it was not really a ‘loss making’ proposition. This guy was and is a property bear but primarily on the investor side. It was an interesting point of view and one that I had not really considered in the past.

As a mortgage broker …

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Talk the Talk (part 2)

As part of the ethics in writing this article I made a decided point of not actually reading my initial article so there is no way of knowing if in general I was right or wrong. Anyways, I am pleased to present the second installment and can only say at this point that I hope my integrity is intact come the end of it all. The numbers and the paragraphs below them are the originals from the article at the end of 2005, the Result & Humiliation score are todays take on what actually happened since they were written.

6. Product or client specific lenders

We have already spoken about ‘sub-prime’ lenders, this is product or client specific lending based on a pre-set target market, but who’s to say it shouldn’t work both ways? What about a lender who deals only with people who earn over €100,000 or who have a net worth of €1,000,000? Previously this may have been the stock and trade of the ‘private banking’ wing of certain banks but there is scope for this type of …

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