Most first-time buyers start with portals and viewings, then work backwards to the question they should have asked first: am I actually ready to do this? Readiness is not just having a deposit. It is money, circumstances, and timeline lining up at once — and an honest hour with the questions below will either give you confidence to proceed or save you from an expensive false start.
The money questions
1. Do you have the deposit — plus the costs on top?
The headline number is the deposit: realistically 5–10% of the purchase price as a minimum, with better mortgage rates unlocking at 15% and 20%. But the deposit is not the whole cash requirement. Add legal fees (£1,000–£2,000), a survey (£400–£1,500), stamp duty if the price is above your relief threshold, moving costs, and — critically — a buffer for after you move in. If buying would take your savings to zero, you are not quite ready, however adequate the deposit itself is. Our deposit guide covers how to set the target.
2. Could you actually get a mortgage, at a payment you could live with?
Lenders will typically lend around 4 to 4.5 times your income, adjusted for your outgoings and debts — and they stress-test whether you could still pay if rates rose. Run your own version of that test: take a realistic monthly payment for the mortgage size you need, add 2–3 percentage points to the rate, and check whether the resulting figure would break your budget. Then get a decision in principle (DIP) — a lender's indicative, credit-checked statement of what they would lend you. It is free, it takes days not weeks, and it converts guesswork into a number. Estate agents will also take you far more seriously with one.
3. Is your credit file ready to be inspected?
Check your file with the credit reference agencies before a lender does. You are looking for errors (they happen, and they are fixable), old defaults you had forgotten, and easy wins: being on the electoral roll at your current address, closing unused credit accounts, and avoiding new credit applications in the six months before a mortgage application. A mortgage application declined for a fixable credit issue is a wasted hard search and a lost property.
4. Could you absorb a bad first year?
Homeowners have no landlord. The boiler, the roof leak, and the mystery damp patch are all yours. A reasonable rule of thumb is to budget around 1% of the property's value per year for maintenance — more for older properties. If a £2,000 surprise in month three would put you on a credit card, build the buffer before you buy, not after.
The circumstances questions
5. Will you stay long enough for buying to beat renting?
Buying has heavy fixed costs at both ends — stamp duty, legal fees, and survey on the way in; agent and legal fees on the way out. Those costs are only amortised by time. The traditional rule of thumb is that owning starts to clearly beat renting somewhere around the five-year mark, depending on your market and what prices do. If there is a decent chance you will move cities, move countries, or need a different home within two or three years, renting the flexibility is often the financially sound choice — not the failure the “rent is dead money” crowd suggests.
6. Is your income stable enough to promise 25 years of payments?
You do not need a job for life — nobody has one. You need reasonable confidence in your earning ability over the next few years. Recently self-employed buyers should know most lenders want two to three years of accounts. If you are in a probation period, mid-career-change, or expecting a significant income drop (a planned sabbatical, a new business), it is usually worth letting your situation settle before applying: lenders will ask, and the answers affect what they offer.
7. If you are buying with someone — are you aligned?
Money conversations first, viewings second. Agree what happens if one of you wants to sell and the other does not, what shares you own if the deposits are unequal (a deed of trust records this), and what your real joint budget is — not the biggest mortgage you can get, but the payment that leaves the life you both want intact. Disagreements about a property are usually disagreements about priorities that were never said out loud.
The timeline questions
8. Can you give the process the six months it takes?
From starting to search seriously to holding keys, four to six months is a normal timeline — longer if a chain builds above you or a leasehold purchase gets slow. If you have a hard deadline (a baby, a job move, a tenancy ending), count backwards from it. Starting a purchase you will be forced to rush is how buyers end up skipping surveys and regretting it.
9. Do you know what you are actually looking for?
Not the dream — the criteria. Area, commute tolerance, minimum bedrooms, the two or three non-negotiables. Buyers who start viewing without written criteria spend their first two months using viewings to discover their criteria, which is an expensive way to learn what a piece of paper could have told them. When you get to a shortlist, our guide to comparing two properties without going in circles picks up from there.
Scoring yourself honestly
If you answered yes to the money questions and yes to most of the rest: you are ready, and the next step is a decision in principle and a proper look at the market. If the money answers are yes but the circumstances answers are shaky: you can afford to buy, but it may not be the right moment — and knowing that now is cheap. If the money answers are no: you have a savings target instead of a vague ambition, which is genuine progress. The worst position is none of these — buying because it feels like the adult thing to do, on numbers you have not run. An hour with these questions is the cheapest property advice you will ever get.