Mortgage free & able to live the dream!

SWSEGirl

Wow - blink and it's been over 2 years!

A lot has happened  - we have moved closer to home! Our London flat became unworkable with our little boy, there was no garden and we could no longer keep him safe on the 3rd floor. 

We struggled to sell our flat - despite dropping the price, so we really extended ourselves and bought a 2 bed bungalow in Cornwall, to be closer to family. It needs a LOT of work - but we needed to move, in order to get our son into the right school, and luckily we did before interest rates rose too high.

It has been such a difficult year - finding nursery care for our son was extremely hard, he needs 1:1 care - and nowhere could offer that - so we've been trying to juggle work around him, which has been near impossible. I've also been doing adhoc care for my Mum when her live in carer has been away. I wasn't able to drive when we moved - which left me very isolated in rural location, luckily I passed my test last month.

Happily our son starts at his specialist school this week.

It has felt as though we've been camping for a year - but we have just exchanged contracts to sell our London flat, which happily means we will have some money (thanks to our mortgage overpayments when we could afford it!) to do the work on the current house.

So once we complete we should have £107,000 in equity from the sale once EA fees are paid, we'll receive an £11,000 stamp duty rebate - and we currently have about £13,000 in savings. This will give us about £131,000.

The work we need to do on the house will probably exceed this budget - but we'll also have the capacity to save each month and do it in stages. I'm in the process of getting builders' quotes, and we already have our plans - although planning permission won't be sought until next year, due to the various  ecological surveys which are required - we have plenty to get on with that fall outside of planning jurisdiction!

We originally took a mortgage for £420,000 over 40 years for this property - and it is valued at £520,000 - I'm hoping to increase the value considerably with the work we have planned - although I appreciate the property market is a bit more wobbly than it was. We are on a 5 year fixed term at 3.2% - this is up for renewal August 2027.

At the moment the priority is getting the work done on the property to make it more liveable and hopefully increase its value and our equity. Once the work is complete we will turn our attention to paying down the mortgage!