Two years and then downsize... DONE!

Sapindus · 8 April 2024 at 8:30PM

What a difference four months makes...

Just after New Year DS1 got TWO job offers in 24 hours. There then followed a month or so of frantic flat hunting, car buying, furniture seeking and a crash course in becoming an actual independent adult. All very overwhelming (the first night alone in his new flat he barricaded himself in his bedroom for fear of burglars) but touch wood he is making a success of it and starting to relax and enjoy life.

DS2 is on the point of making his firm and insurance choices for uni, is excited, and looks like he will get the grades he needs. Results Day is 15th August and Uni starts mid-September so realistically I want to move end of August or end of September or any time after that. So work has started on tarting the house up.

Pause to think - is this really happening, do I really want to do this? Break it down - I don't want to live here any more. There are too many annoying things about life in this house that I can't change. Where I move to doesn't have to be set in stone, I can rent somewhere at first and make sure I've made the right choice. And the things I'm doing to the house are things that have needed doing for years. I mean, like skirting boards that have been unattached from the wall for over a decade, or a door frame that's only half painted. It's shameful. So every day I am going round picking a job, even if it's just tidying or cleaning something properly, and doing it and seeing what it leads onto next.

The mortgage came to the end of the fixed rate and is now on the SVR but so far as I can work out it isn't worth getting a new fixed rate if I'll then have to pay an early repayment charge when I sell. It's now just under £19k. It came to the point where I realised I could actually pay it off using my savings. But I won't because I need an emergency fund and a car fund and a moving house expenses fund.

Items of actual money-saving...

1. Experimented with Top Cashback and got £145 off an RAC membership, but it was too nervewracking waiting for it to be approved because I'd ended up spending more initially than I would have done if I hadn't been going through TC.

2. Sold a vial of my blood to the Future Health programme for £10 and got told I'm overweight and have high cholesterol for free.

3. Put my savings into an ISA just in time when I realised that with interest rates going up I do actually need to do this now.

4. Repurposed a kitchen bar we made out of a piece of worktop and made a desk for DS2 now he has DS1's old room to do his schoolwork in. Used the legs off the desk I made him out of an old door during covid. Bought two kitchen trolleys (FB Marketplace and Ebay) to fill the gap in the kitchen, for half the price they would have been new from Ikea.

5. Got a £200 bonus from work for a project I volunteered for last summer. Spent some time venting about how unfair it was for the people who hadn't happened to be having a quiet patch when the project came up for grabs, then swallowed my pride and took it.

6. Prolific earnings for the year £667.

South_coast · 8 April 2024 at 10:40PM

Sapindus said:

2. Sold a vial of my blood to the Future Health programme for £10 and got told I'm overweight and have high cholesterol for free.

😅😅😅

Sounds like things are moving on, there's always bound to be doubts when you make a big change, but it's what you've been planning. I feel you on the "housebarrassment" though, I'm having work done to mine this year and I'm currently at the stage where I feel too ashamed to admit to tradesmen that this is how I actually currently live 😬!

Sapindus · 28 December 2024 at 9:33PM

So many times I have read posts on here from people who start out with the aim of becoming mortgage free, and then when you skip through to the last page they somehow have an even bigger mortgage than they started with.

By the time I sold my house there was £17k left on the mortgage. Have got into a rental where the interest on my savings from the house sale, plus what I'm saving by not having a mortgage, pays the rent, so I have plenty of time to search for the perfect house. I COULD buy a house with cash. But predictably, I have now found a house on RM for more than my cash budget, I'm going to see it on Friday and on paper it is a dream. Huge garden, great location just outside a village with a railway station and with lots of nice footpaths around for walks. I've got an AIP for the mortgage I would need.

Of course, I may not get this house at all. But it's making more sense now how other people end up in this situation!

Sapindus · 17 May at 8:57AM

Final update - I made it!

The dreamy house just outside a village turned out to need too much doing to it. I'd have been struggling. I then viewed 3 or 4 others in very small villages before finding one not quite on the edge of a larger village. It turned out having nice walks to go on was more important than a railway station, and I couldn't afford somewhere that was lovely enough to outweigh the inconvenience of countryside isolation. But there is a regular bus for a 20 minute ride to the city centre, and a less frequent one that stops virtually outside my house.

This house is a 1950 ex-council house and the garden is huge because it's on a corner plot. And having bought it for cash, I still have a £70k renovation budget, leaving myself with a £20k "emergency" fund. I've been here two weeks and jobs keep getting bumped up to the top of my "to do" list! It's smaller than the house I sold, so I have stuff in a storage unit, but I'm getting a large shed in a couple of weeks hopefully (and that's taken longer to organise than I thought it would) and the loft is being boarded in a month or so, which will help hugely with storage. It's oddly difficult to get back out of the "don't spend any money" mindset, but have to remind myself this is what I've been saving all these years for!

The house had been empty for months so felt clammy and spidery, but it's amazing what a difference feeling "lived in" makes. Definitely made the right decision! Good luck to everyone else on their mortgage-free journeys!