Half a house

wishingthemortgaheaway

Try we buy books or Ziffit for the books, zap them with your phone and see how much you can get for them. They don't take everything, but anything is better than nothing. I'm slowly sorting through books and have an empty nappy box under my bed I keep popping them into.


Grrrr on the searches though. You would have thought, in this day and age, it would be a simple, straight forward, quick and cheap process.

Silence101

wishingthemortgaheaway wrote: »

Try we buy books or Ziffit for the books, zap them with your phone and see how much you can get for them. They don't take everything, but anything is better than nothing. I'm slowly sorting through books and have an empty nappy box under my bed I keep popping them into.


Grrrr on the searches though. You would have thought, in this day and age, it would be a simple, straight forward, quick and cheap process.

We tried the online book places, but it really was pennies, so I've just taken them down to the charity shop, they might have more luck selling them at a slightly higher price.

From what I gather most searches are quite quick, but I think they wait to get all of them before going through them, which probably makes sense instead of doing bits by bits, but it's no good for impatient people like me

Silence101

The solicitors are now waiting for paperwork from the developers. They think it's unlikely that we'll be keeping to the deadline... As it's out of our control I'm not too worried about it.
I keep looking on right move just in case there's properties coming on the market in our budget, but nothing yet, or at least nothing with an outside space for the kids to play. So hopefully this works out and soon!

I keep forgetting to update my signature, so will probably remove it. Did a NSD yesterday and hoping for another today. As it's raining it shouldn't be too hard!

Silence101

Another day of waiting. Found a few boxes in town, but haven't started packing yet. Can't believe it's September tomorrow!

Silence101

We received our contracts and have been reading through them. It's coming up with a lot of "cons" in our pros and cons list. We're viewing the house again this afternoon, so we've got a lot of questions to ask, before we phone the solicitors next week. Hopefully seeing the house again will ease my doubts. It no longer seems like a great idea to overpay on the mortgage for the house, as we've heard new builds depreciate quite a bit in the beginning, so I'm thinking we should just build our savings as much as possible to put down a bigger deposit for a whole house in the next 5/10 years. (Sooner the better but we're can only plan with the money/wages we have now)

Silence101

Managed to transfer another £15 to the rent account. We viewed the house yesterday, and took all the room measurements, so we can get quotes for flooring.
It's interesting because we had forgotten some things, so it was nice to refresh our minds. We get to see it one more time between exchange and completion.

As we've been reading through the lease we have a million and one questions to ask the solicitors.

And as expected, after telling us the house had to be reserved there and then, we've found out that none of the other houses have been reserved yet. And that was all over a month ago, so not quite the emergency it sounded like it was going to be.

Silence101

In an attempt to control the toy clutter, (as the new house is smaller and we already struggle with the toys as it is) I've asked the children to pick their 5 favourite soft toys. They were surprisingly quick to finding the ones they wanted to keep. They were a bit upset when I packed all the other soft toys, but I've told them that if they ask me for a specific toy from the bag I will get it out, but they will all go to the charity shop if/when we move (so by the end of the month). I'm pretty sure that at least half will be forgotten (hopefully more)

I've also started packing finally, and can already see a lot of random bits that won't make it to the new house.

Silence101

Tt £0.43! We had to buy a few school bits yesterday, and more folders for all the paperwork the solicitors have sent us.

I packed a bit more yesterday, and have got a bag of things we haven't used since we moved.
We still don't know what we're doing about the house, as the lease is quite prohibitive. We were going to try and overpay initially, but now we're worried about the prices potentially going down that we don't know if it make financial sense to overpay or to just grow our savings. I need to read up on what happens when we're in negative equity really.

Jessy103

Sounds like you're making great progress with the sorting and packing! We've been in our house 10 years now and that's longer than what we thought we'd be because it went into negative equity (we bought it in 2007 and in 2008 the financial crisis happened!). We're working on our savings and getting it up to 6 months worth of bills but we're still making overpayments on the mortgage because we figured the less we have to pay on the mortgage the more we can put into savings. I'm sure once you are moved in and get settled you'll be able to figure out what works best for you.

Fingers crossed you're in your new home soon!

Silence101

Thanks!
We've received the contracts from the solicitors, but we are (ok, ok I am) having second thoughts about it, so we haven't signed them yet. We can't seem to get hold of our solicitors either so things are going into standstill at the moment. I can't say I'm impressed with their communication skills but hopefully the sale will be sorted this month and we won't have to deal with them again.

I am worried there will be a repeat of 2008 what with Brexit and the new landlord tax rules, but I guess house buying always comes at a risk. It just seems to be a bigger risk buying into a shared ownership, as we're dealing with even more people's interests. With a "normal" house purchase you have the owner and the bank to take in account, here we also have a landlord involved, so our "rights" are very similar to rented accommodation, and we could end up losing a lot more than if we were renting. I'm sure it'll all work out, but it's too easy to dwell on the negatives, until we are actually in the house and can start making it a home.