What is involved in selling house and just renting the next one... (Yes, I am stupid with all this stuff)

[Tamashii]

OK... We are panicking about the house prices falling again and everything since we have been stuck in our house with nothing selling in our area until about 3 months ago when the houses that were up for sale for 2 years have managed to sell. We watched their prices drop about £10,000 then picked up again and sold for just over what the owners paid for them quite recently.

Anyway, since houses in our area are now seeming to sell to buy-to-let landlords or 1st time buyers (mostly the former tho) we are wondering if we should sell up and just rent somewhere until we are ready to emigrate next year. It looks like the prices are going to plummet again soon and that no one will be getting mortgages for a while due to the new bank crisis in my opinion (and from what I have been reading) then interest rates are supposed to go up so we won't be able to afford the mortgage anyway and house could potentially be repossessed.

Sorry - this is LOOOOOOOOOONG but mainly I need to know how to go about just selling the house and paying back our mortgage etc to the mortgage provider. How much do you usually end up with in legal fees etc? We are unlikely to make much profit but are really stuck just now and basically have to emigrate in the next year before the visa expires. Oh, our house is likely to get only around £110,000 at the moment at best.

Thanks in advance for any info on this one.

[menagerie]

Depends on what mortgage you have. We sold ours and paid off repayment but kept endowments going (I know, I know). Then rented. It meant we got star treatment when looking for a house. Don't know how that would work if you're emigrating. You could, of course, offer to rent your own house back from a buy to let landlord until you choose to move abroad!

[Mandy21]

WE have also done this - not with a view to emigrating but just to move to a new area. The only thing to add really is to check whether you're tied in for a particular period with the mortgage - in that case there will be a redemption penalty to pay which could be thousands. Ordinarily however, there is usually an admin fee of between £50-£100 for redeeming the mortgage, and you'd have estate agents fees to pay for selling your house. Other than that, its a straightforward process. As the other poster has said, if you have endowments attached to the mortgage, you'd need to consider keeping those. We just had life insurance policies that were associated with the mortgage, so we carried on paying those just to make sure we'd get some kind of pay out if anything happened to either of us whilst we were renting. Then you just find a house to rent, pay a deposit and move in!