Did You Blow Some (or All) of Your Lump Sum?

Langtang

Albermarle said:

Rather than finding somewhere quieter , apparently there is a trend for some older people to move to a city/town centre.
Plenty of development of vacant shops and offices into flats ( some of poor quality but some are fine ) .
Low maintenance - no garden , but very easy access to shops , restaurants , leisure/cultural facilities , No car needed.

I've been saying this for a long time now. With shops closing on our high streets all the time, these places should be turned back into houses/flats. We've got plenty of shop fronts (who have always had the upstairs floors as part of their lease, but never used them in years/decades) in our city that are boarded up.

I think there'd be a big demand for city-centre living from young and old. 

jamesd

Langtang said:

I'm not so sure about renting after you retire. I'd hate to get to 80 only to be told by your landlord that he's selling up!

Would you have any rights as a sitting tennant?

The usual two months plus as long as eviction takes once the fixed term part of the tenancy expires. Assumes the standard assured shorthold tenancy.

Landlords like long term stable tenants who pay without fail but things happen. I've seen a divorce then death of the mother lead to a daughter taking the father to court to force sale of the property and evicting a tenant who'd been there for thirteen years always paying on time. The father told the tenant that the plan was to sell with them in place, the tenant was sick and not checking post so the first the tenant knew was when the bailiff turned up in their bedroom.

Terron

Langtang said:

Sea_Shell said:

jim8888 said:

Sometimes I even think about selling up the house, investing the money, and renting for retirement. I know that renting and not owning anything is a bit of a millennial idea, but I think there might be a lot of sense in it as you grow older.

As for renting in your dotage, I can see the appeal, especially if your tenancy is secure.   No maintenance to worry about etc.   And hopefully in an area not surrounded by "family" homes with kids on trampolines almost what feels like 24/7!!

I'm not so sure about renting after you retire. I'd hate to get to 80 only to be told by your landlord that he's selling up!

Would you have any rights as a sitting tennant?

Imagine having to move house at 80!

Your rights don't change just because a landlord is selling. Properties can be sold with tenants in place.

If a landlord wants to sell a property with vacant possession he would have to use the normal procedure which could be done at any time anyway. If fully opposed that would average almost a year before Corvid, longer now.

Secure tenancies have been slowly going away for decades. Since the late 80s they are generally only created by mistake.

Terron

Langtang said:

Albermarle said:

Rather than finding somewhere quieter , apparently there is a trend for some older people to move to a city/town centre.
Plenty of development of vacant shops and offices into flats ( some of poor quality but some are fine ) .
Low maintenance - no garden , but very easy access to shops , restaurants , leisure/cultural facilities , No car needed.

I've been saying this for a long time now. With shops closing on our high streets all the time, these places should be turned back into houses/flats. We've got plenty of shop fronts (who have always had the upstairs floors as part of their lease, but never used them in years/decades) in our city that are boarded up.

I think there'd be a big demand for city-centre living from young and old. 

Turned back? Many were purpose built as shops.

A former Yates Wine Lodge in the town where I grew up has had the upper floors converted to flats and the ground floor converted to shops. A pair of houses that had been converted to shops have been converted back (the pair sold for less than £100k for both). A Methodist church that was out of use due to their not being able to afford to repair it has been converted into a dozen flats. All in the same area as a block of shops (well 2 shops and 1 office) that I own, all in use.

Work has started on the old police station in the town where I now live to convert it into flats. It is going to cost a lot as the ground floor where the cells were is heavily reinforced.

In Manchester in the 90s the population of the city centre was about 500. It is now well over 30 thousand as the old offices and warehouses have and are being converted into blocks of luxury flats, including the tallest building in the UK outside London with taller ones in progress.

Langtang

jamesd said:

Langtang said:

I'm not so sure about renting after you retire. I'd hate to get to 80 only to be told by your landlord that he's selling up!

Would you have any rights as a sitting tenant?

 I've seen a divorce then death of the mother lead to a daughter taking the father to court to force sale of the property and evicting a tenant who'd been there for thirteen years always paying on time. The father told the tenant that the plan was to sell with them in place, the tenant was sick and not checking post so the first the tenant knew was when the bailiff turned up in their bedroom.

Which would be terrible at the best of times, but when you're in your later years, catastrophic.

Langtang

Terron said:

Turned back? Many were purpose built as shops.

Going back long enough, we have places that used to be houses/hotels/guest houses on the main street that have been turned into shop fronts as the economy grew only to now sit empty for years on end.

Terron

Langtang said:

Terron said:

Turned back? Many were purpose built as shops.

Going back long enough, we have places that used to be houses/hotels/guest houses on the main street that have been turned into shop fronts as the economy grew only to now sit empty for years on end.

Everywhere I have lived the main street has been mostly purpose built commercial properties. In one town most of the upper floors were converted to flats over a decade ago. Where I live now a large part of the centre was destroyed by a major fire. It was replaced by a block of flats with shops on the ground floor. The flats sold rapidly. The ground floor units have been slow to be occupied.

In the town where I grew up the council has recently demolished the 70s monstrosity that was their offices and built new ones. It was too expensive to refurbish. Whilst that was being done they moved to some of the unoccupied premises on the old main street. That brought a large part of the street back into use. Now they have moved to new office the ones they used are unoccupied, but most of the surrounding new businesses remain. Meanwhile the shopping centre built in the 60s that took the business from the main street has several empty units.

My main point is that what you are suggesting has been happening for years in various forms.

daveyjp

michaels said:q

cloud_dog said:

Travel will be our thing, not long-haul but spend time travelling the UK and Europe (for example). 

The how is the big question and a bit of a stumbling block for me TBH, e.g. spend a chunk of money on a campervan (hopefully lots of cheaper second hand ones will be available by the time we come to jump ship), or budget on more frequent holidays (7-14 days each), or standard holiday with lots of frequent long weekend breaks in between, or any combination thereof

Unfortunately my number crunching side looks at the cost of a reasonable second hand campervan and thinks "that is an awful lot of holidays/breaks" 

Currently i fancy the idea of touring around in a nice car and staying in hotels or airbnbs as the depreciatuon in a camper would seem to buy a lot of nights but dont see many others thinkning this way. Are there drawbacks? 

Depreciation on motorhomes is currently close to zero.  The trick is buying one small enough to use as an everyday vehicle so you can then sell your car.

A colleague did this when he bought a 5.5m Peugeot panel van conversion motorhome. Small enough for car parks, but large enough for two and being a motorhome not a camper van it had full on board facilities.

Nebulous2

vulcanrtb said:

It's madness how much we spend on cars (me included, I'm not pontificating). For something that spends around 23 hours a day gathering dust either outside your house or blocking up some car park/road elsewhere ready for the moment it will be used to transport a 50 to 120kg person somewhere. 
Cars are somewhat of a weakness for me, current car is a Golf R Estate, it's way more car than we need and I think I've finally cracked my car obsession, it goes back in September and we bought a runaround from a local car sales place instead. I do about 10000 miles a year by bicycle anyway and now in retirement I have even less of a need for a flash car, though I can definitely afford one. We go to teh alps every July, we'll hire a car for that instead.
Not sure why I bothered posting all that, but if you're on the edge somewhat, give it a try, it's liberating not to have an extremely valuable and easily damaged asset stored in public space!

I had ambitions to cycle more than I drove, but never got there. That mileage is impressive. Its a good year for me if I do half of that. I caravan and in normal times have toured France / Spain for 2-3 weeks at a time. Now I've retired it could be more like 6-12 weeks. I hated having the bikes on the roof of the car, so we bought a van and I've set it up to carry the bikes in the back. At a push if going for a cycling event on my own I could also sleep in the back on a roll mat. The van has now been through two house moves, one for me and one for my parents, and I've no regrets about buying it at all. It has a lot of what you would expect in a car A/C cruise control etc, is much more robust and didn't cost anything like as much as an expensive car, more like the cost of a modest family one. 

michaels said:

cloud_dog said:

Travel will be our thing, not long-haul but spend time travelling the UK and Europe (for example). 

The how is the big question and a bit of a stumbling block for me TBH, e.g. spend a chunk of money on a campervan (hopefully lots of cheaper second hand ones will be available by the time we come to jump ship), or budget on more frequent holidays (7-14 days each), or standard holiday with lots of frequent long weekend breaks in between, or any combination thereof

Unfortunately my number crunching side looks at the cost of a reasonable second hand campervan and thinks "that is an awful lot of holidays/breaks" 

Currently i fancy the idea of touring around in a nice car and staying in hotels or airbnbs as the depreciatuon in a camper would seem to buy a lot of nights but dont see many others thinkning this way. Are there drawbacks? 

I've posted before about the costs. I'm convinced some people I know are spending more than £1000 for every night they spend in their motorhome. It really works if you use it regularly however. Touring in France / Spain you get an off-peak card called an ACSI card which gives you a decent campsite for about 15 euros a night. If you are happy to meander and stay put for a while you also get things like 7 nights for the price of 5 on top of that.

When we first bought a decent caravan we spent over 60 nights in it the first year, while still working full time, all in the UK. It settled down slightly after that, but our caravan prior to the current one was a 1991 caravan we bought for £600 as our car had a low towing limit and we were struggling to find something light enough. It certainly didn't cost us much, but we knew what we were doing and could do a fair bit of nursing it along to keep it going. 

michaels said:

MallyGirl said:

It is another way to travel. We like the fresh air aspects of the camper. We tend to stay 2 or 3 nights and do local things then move on to another location, possibly with bikes on the back. There are lots of places that let you camp overnight for free if you eat there so you can have a few drinks and then just go to bed. Hotels can get quite pricey if you have to buy every meal and drink there - we barbecue dinner most nights having bought local but have a fridge for milk, beer and sandwich fillings plus the crockery and cutlery to have breakfast and make packed lunch.

Actually thinking about it ebikes could make that work, I was thinking one of the downsides of a campervan was too big to drive into and park in the places you want to visit and bikes have no ac and holiday destinations are generally hot but ebikes might well be a solution. Thanks

Although we went for the big caravan and vehicle solution rather than the campervan we have found the cycling infrastructure in much of France and Spain really conducive to that. Its not uncommon to find a campsite 5-10 miles out of town with a cycle lane going right into town. My wife has an e-bike, I have a road bike and we like museums, cathedrals and historic sites. Cycling into town, spending a couple of hours pottering about, having a coffee or icecream, and then wending our way back to the caravan works very well. 

Albermarle

michaels said:

cloud_dog said:

Travel will be our thing, not long-haul but spend time travelling the UK and Europe (for example). 

The how is the big question and a bit of a stumbling block for me TBH, e.g. spend a chunk of money on a campervan (hopefully lots of cheaper second hand ones will be available by the time we come to jump ship), or budget on more frequent holidays (7-14 days each), or standard holiday with lots of frequent long weekend breaks in between, or any combination thereof

Unfortunately my number crunching side looks at the cost of a reasonable second hand campervan and thinks "that is an awful lot of holidays/breaks" 

Currently i fancy the idea of touring around in a nice car and staying in hotels or airbnbs as the depreciatuon in a camper would seem to buy a lot of nights but dont see many others thinkning this way. Are there drawbacks? 

The problem with hotels you can not self cater , so you have to eat out every night and during the day as well. Plus more difficult to keep cheap supermarket beer in the mini bar !
At best you can rustle up a sandwich in your room at lunchtime , if the cleaners are not around .
So the expense adds up, especially if you are on a elongated post retirement holiday .
Even worse if the hotel is not centrally situated ,as you then have to pay their high prices for meals and drinks. 
Of course if you self cater you still probably go out for some meals and drinks , but not every night for 6 weeks .