Confessions of a house hoarder

Right, so, finances.

Home
Interest-only offset, base rate + 1.1% tracker for life of mortgage (20 years)
Originally borrowed: £145,145.00 June 2008
Owing as at 02/17: £115,438.97
Needs to be paid off by: May 2028

Only 11 years to go on this, so we need to step it up a bit. A few years ago we were overpaying to the point where it would have been paid off in time, but then we started putting the overpayment into the offset account rather than paying it off the mortgage so we had the money to buy the fields surrounding the house, which we'd been renting from the previous owner. The offset was starting to build up again when we bought the second house and since then every penny's gone into renovations. I have started to build up the overpayment again, taking a 'boiling the frog' approach of increasing the mortgage payment by £10 every month, but we're going to need to get this down quite substantially if we're going to pay it off in time.

Holiday let
Family loan 3.5% or base rate + 3%, whichever is greater, and 0% credit cards
Family loan: £129,146.86 November 2015
0% cards: £45,270.00

The plan was to put all the renovations on 0% cards, decroft the land the house stands on, plus a little bit for a garden (which you have a statutory right to do under crofting law and makes it mortgageable) and then get a mortgage on the house to pay off the cards. Easy-peasy. Best-laid plans and all that... We'd originally hoped to finish the renovations by October last year, but good tradesmen are always busy and we're well behind. The decrofting application is in, but could take up to 16 weeks to go through and I can't get a holiday let mortgage until I have something in writing from a holiday let company confirming the weekly rental it will be marketed at. The problem is that the cards start coming to the end of their 0% periods in April, so when my mother rang me a up a few weeks ago saying she didn't have anywhere with decent interest to reinvest her 5-year bonds that had just matured and would I like to borrow another £30,000, I literally don't think I could have been more grateful. The cheque is on its way to the offset account against our home mortgage (hasn't quite cleared yet, but I've shown the situation as if it had) where it will sit until it's needed for clearing cards or paying tradesmen. The family loan has a repayment date of 10 years in the paperwork, but since it's currently providing Mum with a better income than she can get elsewhere, I'm only paying interest on it.

greent wrote: »

Your story possibly beats Gally's accidental house purchase, Caz!

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:rotfl::rotfl:I think Gally still holds the title on that one - if I remember correctly, she wasn't even looking to buy something, whereas we actually did have intentions to buy the field!

edinburgher wrote: »

I'd never seen your blog before Caz, fascinating stuff, photos bring just the right level of 'renovation !!!!!!'

My parents renovated a croft in the Western Isles and some of your architecture looks very familiar. I suspect that you'll end up with a much more modern spec than they did, but I find the mix of old and new to be quite charming.

If you'll excuse the phrase, you have bigger cojones than me to attempt that much work on a house! :rotfl:

Thank you Yes, the houses here are built to more or less the same pattern as the ones on the Western Isles, wooden lining boards and all. We're really counting this one as our education. Budget-wise I think we'll just about be even with what it's worth done up when we're finished, but we've had a fantastic lesson in roofing, wiring, plumbing, heating and joinery. We probably could have got away with not doing some of it, but what we're hoping to end up with is a house that needs no major work for decades and is well-insulated enough to keep heating costs down. I suspect we'll need a new boiler in the next 5-10 years, but that's about it.

Thank you, everyone, for a lovely welcome! I'm having a quiet day here, did a bit of work for Mr RPC* this morning, sent off a couple of eBay sales and now I can either list some more beads for sale or do some transcription for NEL*.

For anyone who's not joined this thread from my old one, my main income these days comes from working as a freelance transcriber - people send me audio files and I turn them into Word documents, basically. I spent 10 years running an online shop selling beads and jewellery-making findings from home and although I shut it two years ago, I still have about £13,000-worth of stock here, which I've failed to sell in one lump, so I'm listing in dribs and drabs on eBay at cost price when I get the motivation.

* Mr RPC = Mr Regular Private Client, who started as a dictation client and I ended up becoming a virtual assistant to. He now has an office-based PA and I do less for him, which suits me fine because he used to get stressed if I wasn't at my desk during normal working hours and one of the reasons I like freelancing is that I don't have to be at my desk during normal working hours!
NEL = Nice Elance Lady, my first ever Elance client, who sends me lots of work.
Other clients I'll probably mention with regularity are Journalist #1-#6 (most often #3 at the moment), Large Agency (who got me back into transcribing after a break and who I may start doing more for now Mr RPC is taking up less time), Small Agency (usually has very tight turnaround times, so although they offer me regular work, I'm usually booked up with something else) and Market Research Agency (infrequent jobs, but usually as one project, so several hundred pounds'-worth of files at a time).