Mortgage, savings, and what to do

[DeathAndTaxis]

I'd be interested to know what other people might do in this situation:

£75-100k equity, £100k owed
Currently overpaying by a few £100 every month, planning to double this from next month (currently on SVR)
£50k savings
Lots of work needed on the house - £50k?
2x reasonably secure jobs, as much as anyone can say that at the moment

We can't decide whether to do the work needed and to stay here, or whether to sell the house and to buy another. We seem to be very risk averse and to like having a big savings cushion, but it probably isn't doing us any good just sitting there.

I go round and round in my head about this, and wondered how other people might approach the decision.

Obviously it's a highly personal choice but my thoughts would be:

-What is the £50k of work, is this essential/structural work like new roof, electrics etc, or to add an extension, or is it largely cosmetic like replacing dated but functional kitchens/bathrooms? How badly does it need doing, have you lived with it as is for a while and how much is it bothering you? Have you a view on how much value it would add to do the work? In general I would say if it's structural work it probably is worth doing as obviously if the house has currently got major issues that will lead to it failing a survey, damp, dry rot etc (a) things are likely to only get worse not better so why delay (b) if you try to sell the house in that state you will be limiting your market to developers or people who want a true fixer upper and they will very much want a large discount/bargain basement price to reflect that... if it's more cosmetic but the house is basically structurally sound, it might be more worth investigating selling and buying something else, obviously once you account for sales costs, stamp duty etc you may not save any money compared to doing the work yourself, but for many that would be worth it to avoid the hassle and disruption of having work done - on the other hand if you are fussy decor wise you may find it hard to find something in your price range which exactly suits what you want, and you may feel you would want to 'tinker' with any house you buy anyway, and so you might as well stay where you are now and have everything exactly to your taste? Sorry if that doesn't help much, it really depends where on the spectrum from 'I'll live in the cheapest place possible, don't care what it looks like' to 'I'm miserable if there's ever a single item out of place, my home is a temple' type you are

Overall all things being equal I would incline towards doing the work, you have the money in the bank after all, and for the most part putting the money into your house to modernise, maintain or add extra space is a relatively safe investment AND directly improves your quality of life (unless you are going way OTT for the style and size of house e.g. investing £50k into a top end kitchen in a tiny average house worth £200k, you won't see that money back ).

Of course there are other factors to consider, how old are you and DP/DH, what is your pension situation? What is the SVR rate and any chance of remortgaging to a lower/fixed rate? Any kids, are you likely to need to upsize or downsize in the next 5-10 years? How/where is the £50k at the moment, cash in a current account (that's no great if so as it's genuinely not doing anything for you)? If you spend the full £50k on the house will that leave you with no savings cushion whatsoever, if so that's probably not a great idea and I'd look to save 3-6 months expenses and keep that accessible before doing any mortgage overpayment or work?

Thank you maxelly, your answer includes a lot of things I've been thinking about.

The work needed is both essential and cosmetic - it does need doing, and it very much bothers me. I'm not sure how much value it would add.

The SVR is 4% I think, so I'd like to get off that soon! I'm just trying to work out whether we should pay a chunk off before we do that. I imagine we'd be limited to an annual 10% overpayment once we've remortgaged.

We have one DC, and the house is probably big enough. There's a possibility we might move to another country within 5 or 10 years.

Our savings are in a mixture of relatively low interest savings accounts and some bonds. We can usually save a reasonable amount each month. I believe that both of our pensions are decent, but this is something that I'm planning to check.