Did anyone else cry when...

inigma

Cheers guys,

I am getting ready to start a mortgage free diary, I was saving up so I could have a place to call home, I knew that and my money knew that.

I now see it like a caterpillar, the house is the cocoon and as soon as I have paid it off it will be a butterfly... that's the gayest thing I have ever written.

agrinnall

vacheron wrote: »

Agreed. The Stamp Duty hurt far more than the 85K deposit. Over £8000 to the government for doing bsolutely nothing, and had the house been 22K cheaper it wouldn't have cost me a penny!

I agree in principle, after all, once you take possession of the house the deposit becomes yours again, just in bricks and mortar, whereas the stamp duty has gone into a black hole forever. However, two questions for you.

1) Why did you have to pay £85K deposit on a house worth £272K? (I assume you must have been a first time buyer).

2) Why didn't you negotiate harder and get the house for under the SDLT threshold?

vacheron

agrinnall wrote: »

I agree in principle, after all, once you take possession of the house the deposit becomes yours again, just in bricks and mortar, whereas the stamp duty has gone into a black hole forever. However, two questions for you.

1) Why did you have to pay £85K deposit on a house worth £272K? (I assume you must have been a first time buyer).

Yes, I was a first time buyer. I wanted an offset mortgage and 70% LTV is what the best offset products require. It is also where the "best interest rates to application fee" ratio was for my circumstances. I could have paid a larger deposit, but with an offset mortgage it's foolish to do so.

agrinnall wrote: »

2) Why didn't you negotiate harder and get the house for under the SDLT threshold?

The house was already negotiated down from over 290K and the final price included lots of fixtures and furnishings, so trust me there was a lot of negotiating!
After formulating and considering many methods of "getting the price under the threshold", I was advised by my lawyer that such a high discount would doubtless mean that the alert lights of the inland revenue systems would be set off "like a christmas tree" for further investigation and so I bit the bullet and played by the rules.

At the end of the day I was not willing to gamble with the roof over my head and potentially my freedom by commiting fraud against the government! No matter how unfair and non-linear I consider that "tax" to be.


Edit: PS Inigma, I genuinely "LOL"'d at your last comment. I think your analogy is lovely, and don't let the nasty boys tell you anything else.