I won't ultimately disagree with the mortgage advisor but I don't think he gave you all the options available.

A joint mortgage (or joint tenancy as it is known) can be a risky mortgage in a case like this. The best comparison to offer is that of a boyfriend and girlfriend who buy a house together in the traditional manner (joint tenancy) and spend a year or so together and then split up. One leaves the house and doesn't pay the mortgage any more, the other is left with the mortgage and the choice to either stop paying, gety repossesssed and ruin both their credit or keep paying to keep the house and protect their credit and the other person effectively walks away with no moral responsibility....and could even come back later and claim any profit made by the sale of then house.

This is the danger of a joint mortgage. You will both own the house 100% and are both responsible for it 100% but if one walks away it is hard to pin them down to their responsibility as it is a 100% shared responsibility and not individually

For a case like yourself you would be better advised to get a "Tenants in Common" mortgage. This is effectively 2 people still buying the house but the difference is that you will both have a specific legal share of the property. 50/50, 60/40, 90/10. How ever you want to work it. You would then be financially responsible for your share. Lenders can often accomodate this type of mortgage and it isn't any extra work for the legal side. It does mean that if one party walks away they are still legally responsible for their share as it is in their name only and if one person wanted to sell their share the other person could take on this percentage of the property themselves.

The only danger for Tenants in Common is if one person sells and the other person doesn't want to pick up the share then it will be very hard to find someone that will take that share on and can effectively make the house worthless as nobody will but less than 100% share of a house on the market.

Dear all,

I moved in to Milton Keynes two years ago, not expecting to be here for very long. Having realised now that I've paid about 12k in rent since I arrived, I decided to buy a house in conjunction with a fellow housemate who finds himself in the same position. We're both engineers, and earn in the early 30s, so we found a 3 bed house up for 185k. With a 10k deposit each, the outlay seemed pretty reasonable – neither of us were interested in crippling monthly outgoings.

My housemate went to see a mortgage advisor at his bank earlier in the week, who advised him that joint mortgages are a bad idea, and he should go it alone, which is what he’s now doing, raising a mortgage of 160k for his own place, and I’m now stuck doing the same.

I’m irritated because the deal fell through as a consequence of this advice; I didn’t want to take on a large mortgage with large monthly outgoings, I just wanted to ensure that whatever I was paying out for my accommodation wasn’t evaporating entirely.

Is it fair comment that joint mortgages as a practical arrangement between cohabitees is generally a bad idea, or is it possible that the bank’s mortgage advisor has an ulterior motive for making this suggestion?

Thanks,

Phil