£22,154. That is the number at the bottom of a spreadsheet tab I called "The Actual Cost", and I'm quietly pleased with it, because on 27 December I had guessed £24,500. Five months after getting the keys, the receipts and bank statements are finally in one place, so here is every pound it took to buy our £187,500 house, line by line.
The list
- Deposit: £18,750 (10% of £187,500)
- Conveyancing, searches and related fees: £2,484 (broken down below)
- RICS Level 2 survey: £560
- Mortgage fees: £0
- Stamp duty: £0
- Man and van: £340, plus a £20 tip
The mortgage fees are £0 because we chose a fee-free product, and our broker was paid by the lender, so nothing came to us. The stamp duty is £0 because of first-time buyers' relief, and our price was below the lower limit that came in on 1 April anyway. Those rules change, so the person to ask is your own conveyancer or adviser, not me.
Of everything on that list, the survey is the line I would defend hardest. It cost £560, and the problems it found got £2,500 off the price, so it paid for itself more than four times over. That reduction also trimmed the deposit by £250 on its own, because the deposit is 10% of the price. The mortgage itself, £168,750 over 30 years, was the lender's money and went straight to the seller's side on completion day, so it never touched our account and isn't in any of these figures.
Our cash available was £28,140: £18,940 from my Lifetime ISA and £9,200 of Matt's savings. Take away £22,154 and about £6,000 was left. We put £3,000 of that straight into an emergency fund that we agreed not to touch, and the rest was for the first jobs. The first jobs did not wait.
The £2,484 in detail
Our conveyancer's first email listed every cost they expected, and I have been grateful for it ever since. Every firm's list will look different, so this is only ours:
- Fixed fee: £1,195 plus VAT, so £1,434
- Searches: £326
- Land Registry fee, ID checks, bank transfer fees and the Lifetime ISA admin: £424
- Declaration of trust: £300
That adds up to £2,484, and none of it came as a surprise, which is a sentence I would not have believed back in November. The seller paid for the £28 indemnity policy on the chief rent, so it isn't in our figures.
Why it came in under
My December estimate rounded every line up and then added a cushion for the things I hadn't thought of. I assumed about £2,600 for conveyancing before the searches and small fees were itemised, which turned out to be roughly £100 too high. I pencilled in £450 for removals before we had a single quote, and we booked a van for £340. The cushion, almost all of it, went unspent. I have never been so happy to be wrong about a total.
What isn't on the list but felt like it
Some things felt like buying costs while I was paying them, and I have made myself keep them off the main total. The February rent on the flat was £725, because our tenancy ran to 28 February and we had already moved. The oven cleaning deduction from our deposit was £60. There was the £22 kettle we bought on the way to collect the keys, a £22 carbon monoxide alarm, £38 for new lock cylinders, and £180 for the electrical report. Curtains for the front room and the bedroom came to about £100.
Add them up and it is roughly £1,150 on top of the £22,154. None of it is the cost of buying the house, and all of it is the cost of starting to live in it, which my bank balance did not seem to distinguish between. The tab next to the main one, which I called "House", stands today at £3,692 for the jobs since we moved in, and it is nowhere near finished.
Matt looked at the two totals side by side on the laptop and said we had paid £22,154 for the privilege of spending the next lot.
