I will give lots of detail (name changed) for context. Apologies in advance for the essay.
DH and I currently live in the south east with 2 DDs (5 months and nearly 3). Bought this house in 2020 for £390k on a 5 year mortgage as a doer upper. We have almost finished everything we wanted to do at this stage, spent about £60k. Thanks to improvements and the rise in prices it is now worth around £450-475k. House prices are obviously quite high here (ours is a 3 bed semi) but there is no specific reason we need to live here - our jobs aren’t tied to this area.
We are thinking of moving at the end of this 5 year mortgage period (sept 2025). This would also coincide with DH finishing some training which would mean he is looking for a different type of work opportunity. Our DDs would be nearly 7 (starting year 2?) and 4.5 (starting reception).
Reasons for moving are mainly for a different lifestyle but also to enable us to have a bigger property without taking on more mortgage. We both grew up in semi rural areas - I was in the countryside near hills/forest/farms and DH near the coast. Neither of us feel “at home” in a very urban environment. It’s not so much that we want to be closer to walks/beaches etc - there is actually a fair amount of green space within a 30-60 minute drive of here - it’s more that we want to get away from the traffic and the proximity to London etc. We’d also like somewhere with more community feel, but it might be tricky to find what we are after - a mix of nice traditional British town/village but still forward-thinking, some cultural diversity, alternative scene (like a kind of Brighton/Bristol vibe but without being a city?!).
We’d like a house big enough for family and friends to come and stay. Ideally 4 beds, so DDs can have a room each plus a spare. Plus a home office somewhere. Decent garden space. Nice kitchen/diner. Basically one step up from what we currently have now. Ideally this next house would be our “forever home” where we’d raise our girls and not have to think about moving again until they’d flown the nest and/or we are retiring.
If we tried to buy this house in one of the local more rural villages (Berkshire/North Hampshire) it would be about £800k which is just not in our budget. For complicated reasons we have peaked quite early in terms of our earning potentials and combined we wouldn’t expect to be earning substantially more than we are now for at least ten years (due to DH training and then I might also make a sideways move). So we need a cheaper area really. Ideally we would actually reduce our mortgage hence wanting to move at the end of the mortgage period so max. £400-450k budget ideally.
However we do need to be easy distance to universities for my job and to hospitals/universities for DH’s job. So that rules out very rural areas as we don’t want to take on massive commutes. We have family ties to Southampton/Bournemouth areas, Surrey and Herefordshire all of which seems to imply that we should find somewhere else in the south but we need to get away from London. So maybe SW (outskirts of exeter? Somerset?) or perhaps South Wales (look for jobs in Cardiff/Swansea?). But I also want to explore the option of Scotland, as Glasgow and Edinburgh have good rail and air links to the south but I just don’t know enough about the areas.
Well done if you got this far. Happy bank holiday!