Confessions of a house hoarder

cazmanian_minx

I'm learning an awful lot of new words at the moment, the most interesting of which is cross-collateralisation. A buy-to-let mortgage is out, because lenders want them stress-tested to 5.99% with 145% cover and no way would our house rent for £850 a month on a short assured tenancy up here. The residential mortgage broker I'm currently dealing with wants to approach two holiday let mortgage lenders with our figures, so I have a ton of paperwork to fill in over the next couple of days, but if neither of those options works (or proves expensive), then I've found a commercial mortgage broker who specialises in holiday lets and development finance and reading through some of their case studies, they're quite used to setting up fairly complex deals where finance is secured against more than one property - which could be very useful in freeing up money against the holiday let when the title is granted. Rates of under 3% and interest-only available too, which I think it may not be from the residential options. I've sent them an email, anyway.

cazmanian_minx

Credit card shuffle done and the list now looks like this:

Barclaycard-that-was-an-Egg: £0
Barclaycard: £7760 - 0% expires 1st August 2017
Halifax: £9050 - 0% expires January 2018
Nationwide: £5600 - 0% expires October 2018
Lloyds: £4820 - 0% expires December 2018
Tesco: £3050 - 0% expires March 2019

Please cross fingers for a nice cash transfer offer on the empty Barclaycard before August!

Jessy103

Wow! Loved reading through your diary and have saved your blog on my favourites page! Good luck with everything and I will be following with interest and excitement!! x

cazmanian_minx

Thanks Jessy - new blog post went up last night

I've been doing my accounts today and really wish I hadn't! Typing invoices for the year came to £13,795, which I'd really rather had been closer to £15,000, but not too far off. Crofting income was £226 from hay sales. House income was zero unless you count a £9.12 refund from a supplier shorting me a sheet of plasterboard on a delivery. Expenses-wise I spent £10,120 on the croft (£6,724 of that was the tractor and the new fencing) and.......wait for it......._pale__pale__pale__pale__pale__pale__pale__pale__pale_........£54,820 on the house. And I haven't raided Mr Minx's Screwfix and Tooled-up accounts yet to find all the invoices he forgot to give me, of which I'm sure there are many.

So I don't think we're going to turn a profit on this one(!!!!!!) but in terms of a learning experience, it's been absolutely invaluable.

cazmanian_minx

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

So I don't think we're going to turn a profit on this one(!!!!!!) but in terms of a learning experience, it's been absolutely invaluable.

For someone who's supposed to be financially-savvy, I sometimes have an epic maths fail :o:o:o:o:o Purchase price of the croft tenancy was £77,500 (we paid £95k for both crofts, £5k off the asking price, and this croft with its land was valued at £79,950 on the home report, so take off half the £5k), we've spent a bit over £55k if you add in what we bought in March last year, so that brings us to a bit north of £132,500 and it should be worth in the region of £160/£165,000 when done - so still a bit of wiggle room in it yet, although I think the hours we've put into it ourselves will be below minimum wage

Anyway, please do some finger-crossing, as the broker has found us a 1.99% interest only holiday let mortgage, we've passed the affordability checks and we're now proceeding to a full application for an agreement in principle. Hopefully their underwriters will decide we're a good risk.

cazmanian_minx

Home alone for a few days. It should only have been today until Thursday afternoon, but with a decent amount of snow forecast for last night and temperatures not above freezing all day today, we decided that Mr Minx should stay the night in Inverness last night just in case the roads got closed.

So, list of things I need to do before he gets home:

• Laundry
• Ironing
• Declutter bedroom windowsill
• Get the potatoes chitting
• Get some salad seeds going in the propagator
• Sharpen at least one mower blade
• Go through books in the study and fill a couple of boxes for charity shop
• 2 files for NEL
• Finish plastering downstairs and go over bits that need filling in on the sanded-down stuff

What I actually want to do is curl up inside my duvet and not come out again until it's warm, but unfortunately that's not an option!

FloppyDisk

Hope the snow doesn't catch you two out. Are the horses quite happy in this weather? Mine is enjoying the opportunity to frolic naked, he would be most put out with snow at this time of year.

Really interesting reading your musings about BTL mortgages and stress testing, I can't imagine many people are getting the figures they want.

cazmanian_minx

FloppyDisk wrote: »

Hope the snow doesn't catch you two out. Are the horses quite happy in this weather? Mine is enjoying the opportunity to frolic naked, he would be most put out with snow at this time of year.

Really interesting reading your musings about BTL mortgages and stress testing, I can't imagine many people are getting the figures they want.

I did throw some rugs on them yesterday morning as a precaution - they're both at the stage where they've shed most of the outer layer of winter coat but the insulating layer hasn't come off yet, so they look like oversized baby birds covered in down and of course it gets very waterlogged. That's only the second time they've had rugs on this winter, but they were quite grateful! We're due 18C next week, which should encourage them to finish moulting

The broker got in touch today to report that the lender had said they liked us, but not our house They felt it was too remote for them to want to risk lending on, as they didn't think we'd get enough people wanting to stay in it. So I asked the broker if he thought it would be worth pointing out to them that the house is on the North Coast 500 route, tourist numbers are growing exponentially, and sending them a link to a recent article by no less than Conde Nast Traveler which praised the NC500 as probably the best road trip in the world. He thought it was worth a go and sent them all the info, along with a picture of our house I took last summer (which is pretty much what you'd imagine when someone says 'traditional croft house overlooking bay') and so he contacted them again at about 4.30 and they didn't come straight back with another no. Fingers crossed.

Not doing brilliantly on my list, but I had some unexpected files from Journalist #3 and I've got a big financial file booked in for overnight tomorrow from Large Agency. Trying to get the first of NEL's files typed tonight, 28 minutes down, 30 to go. Oh, and the potatoes are chitting on the kitchen windowsill

Jessy103

I will cross my fingers and toes for you and hope the lender changes their mind! I've never visited the Highlands or Scotland for that matter but after reading your blog it is definitely somewhere I would look at going especially if I can find somewhere that is dog friendly. I'm sure my dogs would love having a good run round all that land and on the beach!

mfmaybe

That's a worry about the mortgage. Do you have other options in terms of lenders?

(although I'm not clear, is it the potential purchase this refers to, or Ethel's house?)