Ztan's Shared Equity Story- MFW from the word GO

vl2588

You sound very positive :j hope all the annoying car-related stuff gets sorted relatively fuss-free.

[Deleted User]

Ah okay I get it!! :rotfl: thanks for the clarification on that LP! not a bad description!

originalmiscellany

Any chance of a 2011 update?!

ztan

Well, it has been ages since I was last here... and people may well have lost interest but I thought I'd pop in and give everyone the update.
We have now been in our house 2 years! It has literally flown by.
Things have been relatively quiet for us, no major changes or developments. We haven't been as great at putting our money aside as we had hoped, but we do have a new plan. Plans are good.

Once we have finished the garden....- sideline- our turf got destroyed by Leatherjackets so we have been on a mission to reclaim our garden. It resulted in us designing and laying a patio, all by ourselves! We have just finished a raised bed and are now regrowing the grass feeling fairly certain we have banished the leatherjackets. It will be my life mission to destroy every daddy long legs I ever see
....
So once, we've finished we have done everything we wanted to do to the house we can crack on with saving towards the deposit for our next house.

We have realised with things the way they are, OP was not going to work out for us, as there would never be enough equity or a decent LTV within 5 years, rendering us stuck in the house.
HOWEVER, if we save all the money we would be OP, then we will have enough for a substantial deposit on a house in the future. Then when we sell ours, 20% of the value gets paid back to the builders and we walk away- possibly with nothing but that's okay as long as we have a deposit.
We will not make money on the house- end of. So this is sort of doing it all back to front. Most people have to save a massive deposit and then buy their house. We've already got the house, now we're saving a deposit for our next one.

We are still on target to have aprox £25-£30k as a deposit... plus we're also saving for a trip to Australia!!! My OH has family there so we have vowed we will go. Maybe by then he will have popped the question and we can also be saving for our wedding- who knows?!

Generally though all is going well. Shared Equity is not a nightmare, as long as you aren't hoping to make a quick buck out of a house.

We are very much living the MSE lifestyle and have become pros at DIY. We recently fitted a new exhaust to my car. No way am I paying £300 for someone else to do it. Parts of Ebay £80. DONE

Here's hoping things continue to go well and the leatherjackets don't come back!

ztan

Oh and re-reading the LAST posts... from ages ago...
We did get compensation from the dreaded people who sold us our house... the Render saga is something I tend to block out now. It ended with me sending copies of ALL of the correspondence to 6 different people, including Watchdog. As soon as they saw I'd sent it to Watchdog, they jumped on it and it all got resolved very quickly.

It was a massive relief it was over.

I had just started my new job last time as well- I'm still here. My Dad was my boss when I started here... but he left a while ago now and things have been much easier since. Only struggling with the commuting now, as it's about 75 mins each way. I am not good with traffic.

But that's it... plodding on through. I'm getting so old I even have a pension!

vl2588

Thanks for coming back with an update! Glad it's all going well, well done for fitting the exhaust too!

ztan

Hmm, I forgot how addictive all this MFW stuff was! I haven't done much work in the last 2 days!

My OH and I sat down last night and did some SERIOUS calculations. We are behind on our savings, which is a massive pain in my side... but inevitable with kitting out the house and garden etc. We are at a good point to start afresh now though so yay!

So, last night we agreed we would up our mortgage payment by £125 a month, especially as we've just dropped to the SVR and our payments are next to nothing in the grand scheme of things.

By making £100 OP a month, we will reduce our mortgage by 9 years and save £20k in interest! We will also have our mortgage down to our preferred £99k in 3 years time.

This means we can sell our house in 3 years and possibly walk away with a very small amount of equity.
In an ideal world, it'll work like this:

2015 sell house for £140,000.
Developers take 20% = £28,000
Remainder= £112000. Mortgage- aprox £99000... £12,000 for fees and towards deposit on next house.

Minimum savings by 2015, £20,000- add aprox £12,000- "deposit" of £32,000... We will be able to buy a bigger 3-4 bed house for £160,000 with a mortgage of £127,000.

We would then be able to work at OP on this one and being MFW all over again! :T

Obviously, we know that plans never go to plan... but it's a pretty good plan for now! The way we're figuring it, we will still be MF by our mid-late 40's... I'm 23 and he's 27.

So we are currently saving £450p/m for our "deposit", £80p/m for Oz trip and making OP of £125p/m... which means we have NO money left, but I'd prefer to keep tucking it all away, than spending it away. I know we're very lucky to be able to do this!

:A

vl2588

Sounds like a very good plan to me!

ztan

Random posting, so feel free to ignore... am having an extremely tense day. I applied for a new job last week, and should be hearing today or tomorrow if I got an interview or not.

I am very anxious... I want this job SO much. I have been in my current job almost 2 years and I was hoping to stay for a while. This is to date the longest I have ever kept one single job! (I think at last count this was my 11th job in 10 years!)

The problem with my current job is purely the travel. My job is in Bristol and I live an hour away. I only passed my driving test a few months before I took this job and I have been driving to and from every day since. It is something I find HIGHLY stressful and I have finally hit that point where I just can't take it anymore.

At the beginning of the month they started major roadworks on my route, and no word of a lie I burst into tears in my car. It's causing me even more delays and I just cannot cope with having so much of my time taken from me.

Anyway after the aforementioned tears, I resolved to look for a new job closer to home. I found one. I found my PERFECT job.

It's working in a school as an administrator, the kind of work I've been doing my whole career and enjoy. It's 15 mins from home at a push. It pays the same pro rata (naturally all of the school holidays would become my holidays!) as my current job... and as I may have mentioned I'd get all the school holidays off!

My biggest bug bears in this job are:
a) the travel
b) not having enough time to do things like make and sell my jewellery
c) spending too much of my pitiful wages on petrol

This job would solve ALL of this, and there is even the chance of promotion to a higher pay band etc later on.

I discovered the job less than 24 hours before the closing date and had to sit at work and fill out my application secretly. I feel like "someone" has thrown me a lifeline with this job, and I'm desperately hoping I get it. I am so miserable and tired all of the time, I NEED this.

ARGH!!! Wish me luck (if you want to... it might help you never know)

happycamel_2

hey, good luck with the application. That "someone" can be a pretty powerful bloke if he's on your side; I've certainly found that everything I really needed has been provided, since I found my faith. Not least a supportive community when times have been hard.

Good luck with the budgeting too, I'm longing to get to that point but we're in a state of flux in the run up to me starting maternity leave again so our finances look a lot better than they will be in the long run. Your approach is really inspirational. I envy your planned to trip to Oz too, I loved it there.