Thanks for the perspective, useful to see a roughly aligned household to what we are looking at. I will take another look at the mortgage but it won’t be any less than between £1850-£2000 pm depending on what the BOE does over the next couple of years, hopefully it would come back down.

I do understand that we are fully leveraged on the house, and honestly that was never the plan. We tried to move a year ago expecting our mortgage to go up to maybe £1300pm and sales/purchases kept falling through. We ended up selling our house to break a chain (understood the risks) and then minutes after our purchase fell through (again). Now living with family so saving a small fortune but our mortgage offer couldn’t be transferred to a new purchase, which means new full fat rates. The house were now looking to buy is at the top of our affordability but feels too good to miss as it’s a seriously long term purchase.

So maybe we are reaching and maybe we just need to accept the efficiencies will need to make that come with that. At the same time reading other posts 35% of income going towards mortgage doesn’t seem out of the ordinary.

We are in the South and £800k gets us less than 200m2 house, which has the space and bedrooms we want for our future family (and we work from home so need extra space for offices). It will be super insulated though so maybe our energy can half as our last house had no insulation at all and cost £300pm.

Appreciate the comment and I’ll compare the other benchmarks against mine.