we want to buy, but wife has NE in a jointly held property

My wife and I need to find somebody at the top of his/her game when it comes to the financial aspects of buying our first home.

Could people recommend questions that we should we ask her/him?

Unfortunately, following financial advice back in the Bubble my wife and her relative bought a house as an "investment" and all the advice turned out wrong. The relevance of that today is that the property if it were sold now would leave them with c. €130,000 debt between them. As the mortgage is jointly and severally liable, we have been informed (by a BofI mortgage adviser) that in mortgage calculations she is liable for the entire €130,000, rather than just half of it. Actually, what he said was that she would be liable for the entire €430,000 loan if the property were not sold and that if we could get a €450,000 mortgage, in reality we'd get €20,000 plus whatever they added from the rental income of the now €300,000 house.

At any rate, we want to be free of that house and to be able to start our own family. But people are saying to hang on to it (it's securing €1600 rent per month) and prices will go up again rather than sell and solidify the losses. Psychologically, it doesn't appeal to me (I'm the "landlord" who's called to fix things). We are on a combined income of €110,000, have no other debts and have c. €170,000 in savings. What are our options? Thank you.

Your wife and someone else has a mortgage of 430k on a houseworth 300k. What is the interest rate. If it's a tracker, she is paying around 5k in interest. She is getting 20k rent, so this would be a good investment. if it's on a non-tracker, she is paying around 17k interest so it's an ok investment. Whatever way you look at it, it's not right to sell the house at a loss.

Let's say you sell it and your relative coughs up half the shortfall . you will pay 65k in cash which leaves you with 105k. So you probably could buy a house for around 400k..

another possibilityt to investigate. could you take over the mortgage on the investment,i.e. buy out your relative and move into the house. which lender is it? they might allow you to transfer the negative equity or tracker to a new property.

Brendan

Thanks, Brendan. It's KBC, and it's a variable rate mortgage. The only "deal" they're willing to do is allow them sell the property and continue to charge them the variable rate on the outstanding loan. Under no circumstances will they give any discount as the two of them are earning enough to service the mortgage (but not to service it and buy a house with their respective families). However, they allowed them to go "interest only" for a while in the past year while they tried to sell it.

Neither she nor her relative have any interest in buying the other out primarily because it was bought in an "investment" area rather than a residential area and it's also too small to be a family home. I suppose, then, if they decide to keep it, is there any more positive outcome in terms of how much of a mortgage we could get than that offered by the BofI guy I mentioned in the op? Would using some of our savings to pay down that "investment" mortgage make any sense?