Featured post: our next home

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Our house, yonks ago.

We’ve lived in our current house for over ten years now. It’s the longest that we’ve lived in a house and for a variety of reasons we’re thinking it’s time to move. We’re not happy with the secondary schools in our area and we’re getting fed up with the area.

It is, as I’ve just said time to move. But to where and to what? In my ideal world we would move to a house in a fairly rural location that somehow also has excellent broadband connectivity. Joking aside, I’ve lived in 1960’s shoebox houses of various shapes and sizes all my life, so it would be a nice change to live in something a bit different. Now that Ned is a little bit older, a wood burning stove or even an open fire would be something I’d absolutely love in a house. Our current place doesn’t even have a faux gas fireplace in the sitting room.

We’ve been lucky enough with where we live that despite having a mortgage that is large enough to not seem that real, we have managed to add almost £350,000 in equity to our house in the last ten years. Typically there are parts of St Albans where the prices have gone up even quicker, meaning we’re now priced out of areas we could have moved to ten years ago. So the increase in equity we have is only really meaningful if we move outside the bubble of St Albans.

Still, we’ve been looking at parts of Harpenden and Hertford where we could move to a nice house if not mortgage free then with a substantially smaller mortgage than we have at the moment. Hurrah! We’ve been looking at the costs of moving, and reckon in terms of estate agent fees, solicitors fees and stamp duty, we’ll be £25k out of pocket, so when it comes to looking at various bank’s mortgage calculators, such as the TSB Mortgage Calculator, we are conscious of looking at the costs and affordability of anything we’re looking at buying.

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