Cost of buying a house calculator
The British Expat Money cost of buying a house calculator crunches the number so that you don’t have to.
There are two ways to use the calculator.
Want a quick estimate – simply key in the house price and your deposit.
But if the property costs over £250K (£425k for First Time Buyers) it’s better to add stamp duty. (There’s a handy calculator for that here).
And if you really want to be thorough, add mortgage interest and enter your own numbers. We’ve gone into a bit more detail on that below.
Cost of buying a house calculator
Taking a more thorough approach
Mortgage Interest
Most people ignore this. They get away with it because it is hidden in your monthly mortgage repayments.
But here’s the thing. If you really want to know how much your house cost, you should include this.
Sure you don’t need to pay it all in one go at the beginning. Instead, you can pay it off bit by bit over time. But make no mistake, that doesn’t mean it isn’t costing you money. It is nearly always the biggest cost there is.
Not only that, but it means you end up paying a lot more for your house than the asking price.
Ask someone how much their house costs and 99 times out of 100 they’ll give you the sale price, but that only tells half the story. Have a look at the table below.
It compares the impact of different interest rates on a £300K house bought with a 75% LTV mortgage ie £75K deposit with a £225K mortgage.
| Interest rate % | Monthly Repayments £ | Total interest £ | How much your house really cost you |
| 1 | £848.00 | £29,000.00 | £329,000.00 |
| 3 | £1,067.00 | £95,000.00 | £395,000.00 |
| 5 | £1,315.00 | £170,000.00 | £470,000.00 |
| 7 | £1,590.00 | £252,000.00 | £552,000.00 |
Even with a 1% interest rate your house still ends up costing 10% more than the purchase price. By the time we’ve got up to 7% you end up paying close to double.
You can use this handy calculator to compute mortgage interest.
Deposit
There is an argument that the deposit is not a real cost because you should get it back when you sell your house.
In a way, it is an investment, like a fixed term savings account or similar. It’s got value, but you can’t access it just when you want it, like cash locked away in a bank.
Because of this some people prefer to ignore deposits. If that’s you, just leave that one blank.
But just remember, there’s no guarantee you’ll get that money back.
Mortgage broker
If you know your mortgage broker fee, enter it in the relevant box. However, if you don’t, just copy the number from the box below. This is an average based on the house price.
If you haven’t yet found one, we’ve taken a look at three of the best independent specialist mortgage brokers here.
Other costs
All the default costs are averages, which you can read more about here.
Some of them are pretty fixed others not so much. Where there is a range, you can see it below the value.
You can change the costs if you want. So if you’d like to take a more conservative approach simply choose the higher value and vice versa.
Along the same lines, if you know exactly what you are going to pay simply enter that number in the box.
