How to secure a 9 times salary mortgage – the Sun shares a secret

How did Gemma Bird get to live the dream? The Sun want to share her journey to wealth in “PENNY PINCHING – I paid off £225,000 mortgage on £25,000 wage… here’s how you can do it too.” Bird is not 105 years old. She’s 39. And her achievement is all the more impressive when you consider her tax bill – on £25,000 a year, take home pay is around £20,650.

You might be wondering how she got a £225,000 mortgage on that income. A mortgage lender will let you have about 3-5 times salary – not the nine times salary Bird seems to have secured. Maybe it’s down to her powers of persuasion, after all she is an Instagram “influencer” with a decent following. The Sun’s article name-checks her favourite supermarkets, and links to MoneyMumOfficial, the social media account where “she shares money-saving tips” – “the business is so successful that Adam has quit his role in sales to work for Gemma full time.”

Well done! Remind us how much that mortgage was.

That mortgage is how much? It’s up to £335k in the Scottish Sun

*The Metro* sees the *Sun’s* figures and says the mortgage was £800,000

Now read on and see if you can work out how hard-working Gemma did it. (A salary of £12,000 a year typically equates to take-home pay of around £975 a month.)