Buying for €275k; have €175k cash. Should I use all the cash or keep some and get a bigger mortgage?

The LTV for the full term of the mortgage is the original LTV for most lender. So you get the 53% rate and reduce your LTV to <50%, it won't make any difference.

The only exception is Ulster Bank.

That is why it's so important to get your LTV as low as possible at the start. Then build up your savings again.

Brendan

username123 - Wow, I didn't realise a car loan would be around 15% interest rate. It's over 10 years since I had my only car loan so I wasn't really up to speed and didn't really look into it. What you suggest makes sense especially if we have the ability to change our repayments on a regular basis.

Brendan - I think this pretty much makes our decision to pay a higher deposit to keep the LTV ratio less than 50% for the more favourable interest rate. I think we might start our monthly repayments at €1,000 rather than €1,300 initially to build back up our savings and buy a car without a loan. The minimum monthly repayment would be around €560 so we are still overpaying quite a bit. Once we get the car and if we are happy with our financial situation, I think we will up it to around €1,350 to help clear our mortgage in about 10 years.

Thanks to all who have offered advice here. Much appreciated.

Just read back through this thread and thought I'd post an update We have been overpaying our mortgage and are on course to clear it in just over 8 years time assuming we keep up overpayments at the same rate. After refurbishments and new car, we have built up our savings again to over €30k. Our combined income has increased to €135k too. The advice offered here finally prompted me to look more into my pension and I've started putting 5% of my income into AVCs. Thanks to all who offered advice to us almost 2 years ago as it was very useful.

P.S. We're expecting a new arrival in the next month so I'm sure we'll need to re-assess all our financial plans all over again