Help me find somewhere to move to!

[WankPuffins]

We are so bloody unhappy where we are it’s ridiculous.

I’m from London. I’ve lived all over the country for spells, but London/bucks is my “home”. It’s where I feel comfortable, where I know. But it’s expensive and we just couldn’t afford to live there anymore. We were totally priced out last year and had to move to where my husband is from, which is a fairy deprived part of the Black County (west midlands).

At first he was up for moving back “home” but he hadn’t lived here since he was 20 and was looking at it with rose tinted glasses. Living here as an adult with children is vastly different and he’s regretting it.

I’m not bashing the area - we’ve just been quite unlucky with where we moved to. Moving so far meant that we had to rely on the in laws who live here to help find a place and we had to move very quickly so we didn’t have a chance to look around properly or look into the area or schools.

Ideally we need to be within 45 mins to an hour of here. I’d prefer south, maybe around Worcester.

Dh had his head in the clouds and thought we would be able to afford to buy a place here, but it’s never going to happen unless we receive and inheritance. And both sides of our families live to over 100, so good genes, but not great for the cash (I’m being lighthearted, I’m not wishing death on the parents/grandparents!).

The max mortgage we could get is 100k, so no chance of buying and renting means we can’t save much and what we do seems to get eaten up with emergencies. We can afford rent up to £850 a month Maximum. We need three beds as have a teen who needs his own room and two smaller dds who can share.

Dh still works in London one day a week and WFH the rest of the time.

I don’t know this area at all. Dh has lived in the south east/London since uni so has no idea either. We are totally clueless and we don’t want to make a mistake with areas. If we move again we don’t want to disrupt our 7 year old again. She’s been so unhappy since we left London and hasn’t settled here (I know lockdown hasn’t helped). So we would like to find an area we can stay in and one day buy in.

We just want a nice area with good schools. Quiet.

Anyone have any knowledge of Worcester, Stourbridge, villages/towns that way? I’d really appreciate any help.

Also thought maybe Redditch?

Malvern is nice but not sure if it's too pricey

Can i ask why you'd only get a £100k mortgage?

@StopMakingATitOfUrselfNPissOff Dh only earns 30k and we have no deposit and some debt. He’s got a good job but it’s local authority so the pay is a pittance. I used to work in care in London so minimum wage and ridiculous shifts which meant childcare took all my Money - moved up here as we can afford to rent on his wage alone.

100k Mortgage is what we were offered by 3 places when we looked into it - 110k when I was working too.

Have you checked over your outgoings and are there any ways you can reduce costs?

@BabyLlamaZen everything was slashed to the bone when we were in London. We do nothing, go no where! All clothes for the kids eBay/charity shops, no subscriptions. We try to save every penny we can to hammer the debt we have (about 10k). There’s literally no coats left to cut! We did that all a few years ago.

We seem to have terrible luck, Dh needs the car to get to London we just had to spend out on repairs, other little things crop up and we have to use savings.

We just want to live somewhere we like! We are resigned to the fact we’ll be renting for a long time to come.

He would look for a job closer to home but like I said, he’s got a great job, good pension. But LAs don’t pay as much as private sector - but working for them has been a god send during covid, his job is totally safe. If he’d switched to the private sector like some colleagues things might have gone the other way.

@StopMakingATitOfUrselfNPissOff I’ve seen some places in our price range to rent in Malvern, but it’s so hard as we don’t know which are the nice areas!

@WankPuffins

100k Mortgage is what we were offered by 3 places when we looked into it - 110k when I was working too.

Not sure if that level of borrowing was based on a multiple of income but these days those rules are no more. Lenders look at your spending and lifestyle also over the last few months.

@Manolin it was from both our banks and a mortgage broker. We were in the process of moving though and it was very hard to get them to believe that Dh job had agreed that he could work from home and we’d be moving 150 miles away!

But like I said, we’ve resigned to renting for a long while yet. Buying will be a while off. We just need to find the area.

@Manolin and it didn’t help that our rent in London was al at Dh entire wage. We A small had housing benefit top up, so that was another barrier. We obviously don’t have that now that we can afford to rent with one income here. When we have paid off the debt and maybe saved a small deposit we’ll look at mortgages again. At least then we can show that Dh job is safe. We initially spoke to a few mortgage advisors who said that it would be hard to try and move so far away while Dh was working in London, even though his boss said he would confirm that they had agreed he could WFH. It was all such a rush though, our landlord was getting his properties repossessed and we couldn’t find anyone else to rent to us there even though we were both working because of the very small housing benefit top up, so we just thought it would be best to get out ASAP.