What things should I consider when getting a joint-mortgage?
The first and most important thing to consider is that this is a BUSINESS TRANSACTION, and needs to be treated as such. Nail down Absolutely All The Details, specifically including what happens if either of you decides it's time to move and wants to sell off your share of the property. Get at least one lawyer involved in drawing up that contract, perhaps two so there's no risk of conflict of interest. What's your recourse, or his, if the other stops making their share of the payments? Who's responsible for repairs and upkeep? If you make renovations, how does that affect the ownership percentage, and what kind of approval do you need from him first, and how do you get it, and how quickly does he have to respond? If he wants to do something to maintain his investment, such as reroofing, how does he negotiate that with you -- especially if it's something that requires access to the inside of the house? Who is the insurance paid by, or will each of you be insuring it separately? What are the tax implications? Consider EVERY possible outcome; the fact that you're friends now doesn't matter, and in fact arguments over money are one of the classic things that kill friendships. I'd be careful making this deal with a relative (though in fact I did loan my brother a sizable chunk of change to help him bridge between his old house and new house, and that's registered as a mortgage to formalize it). I'd insist on formalizing who owns what even with a spouse, since marriages don't always last. With someone who's just a co-worker and casual friend, it's business and only business, and needs to be both evaluated and contracted as such to protect both of you. If you can't make an agreement that you'd be reasonably comfortable signing with a stranger, think long and hard about whether you want to sign it at all. I'll also point out that nobody is completely safe from long-term unemployment. The odds may be low, but people do get blindsided. The wave of foreclosures during and after the recent depression is direct evidence of that. "Your lack of numbers makes the question a difficult read.  What I'm hearing is ""I want a house requiring a mortgage 8X my income.""  This alone is enough to suggest it's a bad deal. On a personal note, when my wife and I bought our house, it was 2.5X our income. 20% down, so the mortgage was exactly 2X income. And my wife was convinced we were in over our heads.  The use of a partner who will take a portion of the profit is interesting, but doesn't change the fact that you are proposing to live in a house that costs far too much for you. If you are determined to buy such a house, I'd suggest you do it with the plan to rent out a room or two to roommates. If you are living in an area where the cost of buying is so high, the demand for rentals is likely high as well.  Absent a plan to bring ion more income, I see no good coming from this. Heed the warnings posted in the other two answers as well." this seems like a bad idea.  Example: You want to sell. He doesn't.  But he doesn't have enough money to buy you out. What will you do? You might want to sell because you need money, you have to move, you want to get married, you want to start a new business, etc. You two are not equals (you need a place to live), so this is unlikely to work. It may clarify your thinking if you look at this as two transactions: I am an Australian so I cannot comment on US tax laws but this is how the Australian Tax Office would view the transaction. By thinking this way you can allocate the risks correctly, Partnership Tenancy Two things should be clear - you will need a good accountant and a good lawyer. I do not agree that there is a conflict of interest in the lawyer acting for both parties - his role should only be for advice and to document what the two of you agree to. If you end up in dispute, then you need two lawyers. "This is more of a long comment but may answer user's situation too. I have dealt with joint mortgages before in 3 states in the US.  Basically in all three states if one party wants to sell, the home goes up for sale.  This can be voluntary or it can go up via auction (not a great choice). In 2 of the 3 states the first person to respond to the court about the property, the other party pays all legal fees.  Yes you read this right.  In one case I had an ex who was on my mortgage, she had no money invested in the house ($0 down and still in college with no job).  [If she wasn't on the mortgage I wouldn't have gotten loan - old days of dumb rules] When we split her lawyer was using the house as a way to extort other money from me.  Knowing the state's laws I already filed a petition for the property but put it on hold with the clerk.  Meaning that no one else could file but if someone tried mine would no longer be on hold.  My ex literally spent thousands of dollars on this attorney and they wanted to sell the house and get half the money from the house.  So sale price minus loan amount divided between us.  This is the law in almost every state if there is no formal contract.  I was laughing because she wanted what would be maybe 50-75K for paying no rent, no money down, and me paying for her college. Finally I broke her attorney down (I didn't lawyer up but had many friends who were lawyers advising).  After I told her lawyer she wasn't getting anything - might have said it in not a nice way - her lawyer gave me her break down.  To paraphrase she said, ""We are going to file now.  My assistant is in the court clerk's office.  You can tell the court whatever you want.  Maybe they will give you a greater percentage since you put the money down and paid for everything but you are taking that chance.  But you will pay for your lawyer and you will need one.  And you will pay for me the entire time.  And this will be a lengthy process.  You would be better served to pay my client half now."" Her office was about 2 blocks from court.  I laughed at her and simply told her to have her assistant do whatever she wanted.  I then left to go to clerk's office to take the hold off.  She had beat me to the office (I moved my car out of her garage).  By the time I got there she was outside yelling at her assistant, throwing a hissy fit, and papers were flying everywhere.  We ""settled"" the next day.  She got nothing other than the things she had already stolen from me.  If I wouldn't have known about this loophole my ex would have gotten or cost me through attorney's fees around 40-50K for basically hiring a lawyer.  My ex didn't really have any money so I am pretty sure lawyer was getting a percent. Moral of the story: In any contract like this you always want to be the one bringing in the least amount of money.  There are no laws that I know of in any country where the person with the least amount on a contract will come out worse (%-wise).  Like I said in the US the best case scenario that I know of for joint property is that the court pays out the stakeholder all of their contributions then it splits things 50/50.  This is given no formal contract that the court upholds.  Don't even get me started with hiring attorneys because I have seen the courts throw out so many property contracts it isn't even funny.  One piece of advice on a contract if you do one.  Make it open and about percentages.  Party A contributes 50K, Party B 10K, Party A will pay this % of mortgage and maintenance and will get this % when home is sold.  I have found the more specific things are the more loopholes for getting out of them. There are goofy ass laws everywhere that make no sense.  Why would the person first filing get their lawyers paid for???  The court systems in almost all countries can have their comical corners.   You will never be able to write a contract that covers everything.  If the shower handle breaks, who pays for it?  There is just too many one-off things with a house. You are in essence getting in a relationship with this person.  I hear others say it is a business transaction.   NO.  You are living with this person.  There is no way to make it purely business.  For you to be happy with this outcome both of you must remain somewhat friends and at the very least civil with each other.   To add on to the previous point, the biggest risk is this other person's character and state of mind.  They are putting in the most money so you don't exactly have a huge money risk.  You do have a time and a time-cost risk.  Your time or the money you do have in this may be tied up in trying to get your money out or house sold.  A jerk could basically say that you get nothing, and make you traverse the court system for a couple years to get a few thousand back. And that isn't the worst case scenario.  Always know your worst case scenario.  Yours is this dude is in love with you.  When he figures out 2-3 years later after making you feel uncomfortable the entire time that you are not in love with him, he starts going nuts.  So he systematically destroys your house.  Your house worth plummets, you want out, you can't sell the house for price of loan, lenders foreclose or look to sue you, you pay ""double rent"" because you can't live with the guy, and you have to push a scooter to get to work. That is just the worst case scenario.  Would I do this if I were 25 and had no family?  Yea, why not if I trusted the other person and was friends with them?  If it were just a co-worker?  That is really iffy with me.    Edit: Author said he will not be living with the person.  So wording can be changed to say ""potentially"" in front of living with him in my examples."
The same thing happened to me when I worked retail during my college years. I agree that it is unfair however, it is what it is. With that being said, there may be several factors that you should consider: the new employees might have more experience or qualifications then you, your work performance based on your manager's perspective, and like in my situation when I worked retail, I started out as a cashier which get paid less than sales associates but when I moved to a sales associate position I still got paid less and when I got my raise I got the same pay a new sales associate would get. I suggest you suck it up and ride it through until you get a real job because in retail, in my opinion, you are expendable, if you don't like their pay they will find someone else. Regardless of how long the mortgage has left, the return you get on prepayments is identical to the mortgage rate. (What happens on your tax return is a different matter.) It's easier to get a decent financial calculator (The TI BA-35 is my favorite) than to construct spreadsheets which may or may not contain equation errors. When I duplicate John's numbers, $100K mortgage, 4% rate, I get a 60 mo remaining balance of 90,447.51 and with $50 extra, $87132.56, a diff of $3314.95. $314.95 return on the $3000. $315 over 5yrs is $63/yr, over an average $1500 put in, 63/1500 = 4.2%.  Of course the simple math of just averaging the payment creates that .2% error. A 60 payment $50 returning $314.95 produces 4.000%. @Peter K - with all due respect, there's nothing for me about time value of money calculations that can be counter-intuitive. While I like playing with spreadsheets, the first thing I do is run a few scenarios and double check using the calculator. Your updated sheet is now at 3.76%? A time vaule of money calculation should not have rounding errors that larger. It's larger than my back of envelope calculation.  @Kaushik - if you don't need the money, and would buy a CD at the rate of your mortgage, then pay early. Nothing wrong with that. "I hear you (and those answering) use the words ""my money"" (or ""me to pay for stuff"") The sooner that ends, the better off you'll both be. My wife and I do have our own checking accounts that we maintain so she can write a check without notifying me, or I can buy her a birthday/mother's day/ etc gift without it showing in the joint account, but nearly all money flows through our joint account. Before we were married, the joint bank accounts were opened as was the joint brokerage account.  You need to work on the budget as a single project and without judging. It's good that your incomes are similar, it makes the dynamics of pooling seem more fair, but for those where one spouse is making far more than the other, the impulse to 'chip in' equally towards bills leaves the lower earner with nothing.  Will your wife go back to work after a maternity leave? Once she's back, and working for a time, things will settle down a bit. There's a postpartum time that's difficult. Women who have been through it will tell you that it can be pretty bad, and the best a guy can do is be understanding and supportive. As long as you are talking ""we"" with your wife, she'll see that you are both in it together. At the risk of sounding sexist, Women's clothing needs are different than men's. I could get away with owning 5 suits which could be replaced at the rate of one per year. If not for my wife, I can see in my own daughter how clothing makes her feel good about herself, and while I'm frugal with most of our budget, my clothing questions are 2 - Will it last? & Will it match other pieces you have? Therefore, clothing gets a line item all its own in the budget.  There are a number of financial things to consider, but I see you are in the UK, so I'll generalize. In the States, there are pretax benefits to help care for a child under 13 (called a dependent care account) and for medical expenses not covered by insurance (called flexible spending account). These let you take money from your pay pretax to use for specific expenses. If UK offers similar, I invite a user to edit the detail into my answer.  Last - once the kid comes into our lives, there's little room for many of the late teen/early 20's spending. Comics? DVDs? Those are the low hanging fruit of wasted money. Saving for retirement, and for University for the kid take priority.  I'm not one to quote cliches but a friend once offered this observation - ""If you are not happy but your wife is happy, you are still far happier than if you were happy but your wife is not happy.""" "I recommend reading What's the catch in investing in real estate for rent? and making a list of expenses.  You have a known expense, the rent, and the assumption that it will rise a bit each year. If not each year, eventually the landlord will bump it, and on average, the rent should track inflation.  The buy side is the complete unknown, especially to us here. The mortgage and taxes are just the beginning. My ongoing issue in the buy/rent debate is that it's easy to buy ""too big"" or at least far bigger that what you are renting.  One extreme - a couple moves from their one bedroom apartment into their purchased 3BR home with far more space than they ever use. No need to paint the full picture of numbers, the house is a money pit, and they live for the house.  Other end - Couple already renting a nice sized home, and they buy a similar one. They rent out the two spare bedrooms for 5 years until they have kids and want their privacy back. They bought smart, for less than market price, and from day one, the mortgage was lower than the rent they paid. By year 5, having sent the extra income to pay down the mortgage, they've paid down half the loan. As the kids come along, they refi to a new 30 yr fixed at 3.5%, and the payment is tiny compared to the rest of their budget.  Simply put, the ratio of house price to rent for that same house is not a constant. When the ratio is high, it's time to rent. When it swings very low, it's worth considering a purchase. But the decision is never clear until every detail is known. The time may be perfect, and the day after you close, you lose your job, or in a good scenario, get a raise and are relocated. Just because you bought low yesterday, doesn't mean the market will pay you a good price today, it takes time for out-of-whack pricing to come back to normal.  A simple question? Maybe. But we first need a lot of details to help you understand what you are considering." You say that one property is 65% of the value of the two properties and the other is 35%.  But how much of that do the two of you actually own?  If you have co-signed mortgages on both properties, then your equity is going to be lower.  If you sold both properties, then your take away would be just half of that equity.  And while the 35% property may be less valuable, if you bought it first, it may actually have more equity.   It's the equity that matters here, not the value of the property.  With a mortgage, the bank is more of an owner than you are until you've paid down most of the loan.   You may find that the bank won't agree to a single-owner refinance.  A co-signed mortgage is a lot easier for them to collect, as they can hold either of you responsible for the entire loan.   If you sell the 65% property, then you can pay off any mortgage on that property and use the equity payout from that to buy out your relative on the 35% property.  If you currently have no mortgage, you'd even have cash back.  This is your fewest strings option.   Let's say that you have no mortgage now.  So this mortgage would be the only mortgage on the property.  It's not so much, as 15:65 is 3:13 or 18.75% of the value of the property.  That's more of a home equity loan than a mortgage.  You should be able to get a good rate.  It might reduce your short term profit, but it should be survivable if you have other income.   If you don't have other income, then seriously consider selling the 65% property and diversifying the payout into something else.  E.g. stocks and bonds.   Perhaps your relative would be willing to float you the loan.  That would save you bank fees and closing costs.  Write up a contract and agree to take assignment of the title at payoff.  You'll need to pay a lawyer to write up the contract (paying a modest amount now to cover the various future possibilities), but that should still be cheaper.   There's a certain amount of trust required on both sides, but this gives you some separation.  And of course it takes your relative out of the day-to-day management entirely.  Perhaps the steady flow of cash would provide what they need.   If your relative is willing to remain that involved, that can work.  Note that they may not want to do this, so don't get too attached to the idea.  Be prepared for a no.  This would be a great option for you, as you pretty much get everything you have now.  They get back the time meeting with you to make decisions, but they also give up control over those decisions.  Some people would not like that tradeoff.   The one time I was involved with a professional managing a property for me, the fee was around 7% of the rent.  If that fits your area, you might reasonably charge 5%.  That gives a discount for family and not being a professional.   There's a relatively easy way to find out what fits your area.  Look around and see what companies offer multiple listings.  Call until you find a couple that will do management for you.  Get quotes for managing your properties.  Now you'll know the amounts.   The big failing though is that this may not describe the issue that your relative has.  If the real problem is that the two of you have different approaches to property management, then making you the only decision maker may be the wrong direction.  This is certainly financially feasible, but it still may not be the right solution for your relationship.   If you get a no on this, I'd recommend moving on to other solutions immediately.  This may simply be too favorable to you. With the calculator in hand (Excel :) you should follow this advise and save a bundle. 1) Calculate how much you are willing to spend per month. 2) Take the longest (in years) mortgage you can find and cheepest (Euribor+0,2% is better than Euribor+1%). 3) Save the amount you are not spending on your mortgage. Whenever the mortgage cost changes (once a year), calculate whether you get more interests on your savings or on a down payment (look at the total cost). Then decide if you make a down payment or keep on saving. My 0,02€ We took a 20 year mortgage and blindly payed every time we'd have 3K€. We payed our house in 6 years. The total cost of the mortgage was way down this way. However, the above theory has a better yield overall. "The (interest bearing) mortgage of £300,000 would be SIX times your salary. That's a ratio that was found in Japan, and (I believe) was a main reason for their depressed economy of the past two decades. Even with an interest free loan of nearly £150,000, it would be a huge gamble for someone of your income. Essentially, you are gambling that 1) your income will ""grow"" into your mortgage, (and that's counting income from renting part of the property) or 2) the house will rise in value, thereby bailing you out. That was a gamble that many Americans took, and lost, in the past ten years. If you do this, you may be one of the ""lucky"" ones, you may not, but you are really taking your future in your hands.  The American rule of thumb is that your mortgage should be no more than 2.5-3 times income, that is maybe up to £150,000. Perhaps £200,000 if £50,000 or so of that is interest free. But not to the numbers you're talking about." I guess most banks will not have an issue with that arrangement. The bank take collateral in the house for the amount your girlfriend needs to borrow, from her part of the house. Most likely the bank will accept the house' value as what you pay for it, assuming you pay fair market value - otherwise they will contact a valuation company to put a value of your new house. If they feel that her share of the house (50%) can cover her loan, they will definitely agree with the deal. You being a foreigner will, probably, have little to say in the matter, as long as you do not need to borrow money for your share of the house.