I send money home every month. Does that affect how much I can borrow?

Yes, it can. How much depends entirely on which lender you ask, and that is the useful part of this answer rather than the discouraging part.

Sending money home is normal. Lenders see it constantly. What they do about it is not the same across the market, and the gap between the strictest and the most reasonable can be tens of thousands of pounds of borrowing.

What a lender is actually working out

When a lender decides how much to lend, they take what comes in each month and subtract what has to go out. What is left is what they will lend against.

The things that come off are your committed costs — a car loan, childcare, a credit card balance, someone you support. What they are trying to work out is simple: if your circumstances stayed exactly as they are, could you still pay the mortgage comfortably?

Money you send abroad every month is a real outgoing, so it is reasonable that it appears in that sum. The question is how.

The three ways lenders treat remittances

A remittance is money you send to family in another country. Lenders split roughly three ways:

• Some treat it as a committed cost, like a loan repayment. It comes straight off what you can borrow, pound for pound.
• Some treat it as discretionary — spending you could stop if you had to, like a gym membership or a holiday. It affects the sum much less, or not at all.
• Some ask why you send it. Supporting an elderly parent who has no other income is a genuine commitment. Helping out when you can is not the same thing, and a few lenders will listen to the difference.

Nobody publishes this in a way you can look up, and it does change. Knowing which lender sits where is most of what a broker is for.

Dependants who live outside the UK

Children and other dependants count towards how much you can borrow whether they live with you in the UK or not. That is the honest answer, and it is the same principle: they are a real cost.

Where lenders differ is in the size of the deduction. Some apply a flat figure per dependant. Some look at what you actually spend. If you have three children living abroad, the difference between a lender using a standard figure and one using your real costs can be very large.

Two things are worth saying plainly:

• Declaring them is not optional. A mortgage application asks about dependants and answering it incorrectly is not something to risk — it can invalidate the offer, and it is the kind of thing that surfaces later rather than never.
• It is not a judgement about you. Every applicant with children goes through the same arithmetic. Yours is the same sum with a different address on it.

What helps

Be consistent. Regular transfers of a similar amount on a similar date read as what they are. Amounts that jump around are harder for anyone to interpret, including a lender trying to be helpful.

Be able to explain it. One sentence about who the money is for and why. That is usually all that is needed, and having it ready avoids a round of questions.

Do not stop sending money to improve your application. Three months of altered statements before an application looks worse, not better, and it is not how the sum is done anyway.

Get the arithmetic done before you look at houses. A lender's view of your remittances is the single biggest reason two people on the same salary get very different answers. It is much better to know which end of that range you are at before you fall in love with a flat.

The short version

Money you send home reduces what you can borrow with some lenders and barely touches it with others. Dependants abroad count the same as dependants here, with the size of the deduction varying a lot. None of it stops you buying.

If you send money home regularly, bring three months of statements to your first call and we can do the sum properly rather than guessing. Your first 30-minute call is free.