Cost of moving - how much😳

[LivingBetter]

We have the opportunity to relocate with work to a part of the country we’ve always wanted to live in. Looking over last few days at Rightmove has shown that we would need to increase our mortgage by at least £150000 to get a similar size house to ours, in what is definitely a more desirable location plus we would have to find about £30000 stamp duty plus other moving costs.

How does anyone manage this kind of move in their fifties and without an inheritance or lottery win? So so disappointing but unless we are willing to squeeze into fewer bedrooms and other location compromises there’s just no way.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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"

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.

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.