Cost of moving - how much😳

This is where I am. It will limit the houses I will consider buying but I can't justify paying that much stamp duty and then the same on work that needs doing. We're selling our house with little expensive work needed. But if we were staying, there are things I would pay to change to make the house work better for us at the stage of life we are in.

I agree that Stamp duty is absolutely fkin atrocious. Another stealth tax - paid because you want to move??? Taxed because you want to move? It's normalised but its ridiculous.

People move house all the time

They really don't mow, stamp duty makes it prohibitive.

"Everyone remembers the 1980s when we had a buoyant booming property market as a backcloth; British homeowners moved home every eight or nine years; so now, with the average at just over 16 years, this means each British homeowner moving around two or three times in their adult homeownership lifetime"

We thought the hard part was getting onto the housing ladder

The ladder doesn't really exist now. Hard to get on and hard to move up.

Stamp duty for us £36k. Solicitors costs are absolutely nothing in comparison. We fortunately had a lot of equity (about £400k) but it means we have had to borrow more than I would like.

We’re looking at around £28k in costs to move. We’re paying it by putting down a smaller deposit (15%) than the equity we have.

In my head I made myself square with the stamp duty as it was about what I would have paid to improve our current house had we stayed in it. The house we moved into didn’t need any work.

I don’t understand your confusion really, most people who move in their 50’s are downsizing and so they have the equity from the sale to cover the costs. I don’t know anyone in their 50’s who would even be thinking about moving and adding £150k to their mortgage, don’t know why anyone would want to voluntarily be taking on that amount of debt at that age!

Regardless of age your equity in the home is usually your stamp duty money. When we moved we used a combo of savings & some equity to cover costs

They build equity in their present home and increase earnings as they get more senior in their careers, so more financial freedom compared to when they were younger.

We are only in our early 40s, but I’d guess we have about £400k equity in our current house. An extra £150k in mortgage wouldn’t put us under because of our earnings. In our 50s, we’ll have no children living at home to boot, which would mean we could downsize if we needed to and lower expenses overall.

Stamp duty is shocking now. I'm looking to sell and will have to pay 5% stamp duty. 15 years ago we sold a house of same equivalent value and it was 1% stamp duty.

It’s never too late to learn more about money and take control, though, OP.

20 years? Then you've simply spent the money you've saved by not having larger mortgage etc on day to day living.
You can't expect to move to nicer area without it costing. Doesn't matter on size of house. My house in London would be 3 times the price. Location, location, location as Kirstie and Phil say.

Unless you had babies at 45, you don’t need 4 bedrooms. Get a smaller house in the lovely new area with sofa bed/air bed for visitors in the sitting room, or work at the kitchen table instead of a dedicated office room.

It's it just the 2 of you? You mention 'squeezing' into 4 bedrooms, but most people in their 50s don't have children living with them/children are about to leave. Buying a home with fewer bedrooms is the way to afford what you're after.

But you’re not downsizing in the same area. You’re wanting to move to a more desirable area where houses cost more. If you downsized in the same area you most likely wouldn’t have this problem.

Stamp duty is crippling. I'm so glad we managed to move during the stamp duty holiday in 2021. Saved us a fortune. We still used nearly all our savings in other moving fees.

Stamp duty is just too high now for many to afford to move.

Most people add the stamp duty costs to their mortgage. Most people upgrade houses in their 30s and 40s and extend their mortgage term, not 50s.

The houses you are looking at must be pretty expensive if stamp duty is 30,000. When you are buying a very expensive house of course the fees are going to be huge, but there are so many places in this country where house prices are not that high, and where the stamp duty would be no where near that high.
You aren’t unreasonable to want to move, but you are unreasonable to expect it to be cheap when you are buying an expensive property.

You need to be more realistic.

Housing has risen so much in value/cost. If you’ve been paying down a mortgage you took out 20 years ago, you paid a much lower price for your house than it will fetch now. Thats the upside. Youve been insulated from the current cost of things, but you’ve made a packet. The downside is the next house you want has also risen in value and stamp duty etc rises with it. It’s why runaway house prices don’t really benefit people who own one house.

It’s not “unreasonable to consider moving” whether you’ve been in your house 20 months or 20 weeks. But that’s not what determines what you can afford. DH does this kind of “I’ve been in this career thirty years so I should be able to have x” thing and calls it budgeting. You work out what you can afford with maths, not vague feelings that you want a thing so you should have it. We are all buffeted about by economic forces. There’s no entitlement to things because we feel we should have them.