Abbey to include birthdays and Christmas in affordability checks

by Aaron Strutt

Feb 27 2012

Abbey for Intermediaries has made changes to their mortgage affordability calculators and they will now take the amount you spend at Christmas and birthdays into consideration.

The lender will ask all Abbey for Intermediary and Santander customers to list regular and non-regular monthly costs.

Examples of regular expenditure include food, drink and clothing, also transport and maintenance payments.  Non-regular expenditure includes subscriptions, holidays, religious festivals and birthdays.

Aaron Strutt, a broker at Trinity Financial, says: “Mortgage lenders take all sorts of things into consideration when they work out how much you can borrow. Children's school fees and travel expenses are quite normal, but I have not noticed birthdays and religious festivals being in any of the other banks' affordability questions.”

“Abbey are a generous lender when it comes to income stretches, so it will be interesting to see if the new rules change things.

“Santander also uses averages from the office of National Statistics to obtain the typical expenditure for customers.”

February 27, 2012