We currently rent and have a pot of money put buy as a deposit towards a mortgage when we eventually move from Manchester. Meanwhile we are strongly pulled to use some of that money (£70k which about 35% of our savings) to buy a one bedroom house in Tuscany. I've wanted to move there for a long time but given that now doesn't seem feasible this seems to be an attractive compromise and will allow us to get a break from the city (and the rain!) for short periods throughout the year. The problem is it really doesn't add up. I've worked out that if we paid £80 a night for an Airbnb we could have 4 x 5 day breaks for 50 years! I guess some people make sense of purchasing abroad by letting the property out. We've done this before in a ski resort in Austria which proved lucrative but we had someone to manage the changeovers there and I just don't think this property would be worth letting out. Everything's stacked against us doing this but there is still the pull and I am posting on the off chance that someone has been in a similar situation, gone for it and can persuade me of the benefits! 😀