Overwhelmed and stressed.

[Manicwithmoney]

I want to start by saying I'm really thankful. This is not a humble brag post but I do recognise that I am very very lucky. We recently bought our first home after living in a flat for 13 years. It's a beautiful property and we are fortunate to have more than 60% equity on the house. Hubby earns approx £100k after tax each year, we have 1 dc in private school and a 6 month old baby who was born prem. Ordinarily I work full time in a professional job but only earn £30k a year as it's public sector work. My job is highly stressful and demanding as it's fast paced, intellectually demanding and requires an emergency response the majority of the time which usually ends up meaning working after hours, being given 'time off in lieu' and then never getting the chance to take it.

I feel really overwhelmed with the new purchase. The property needs a lot of work doing to it and I don't know where to begin. We don't have to move out of where we currently live as it's owned by family but for as long as we live here we will continue to pay 2 sets of bills. Where we live at the moment is also only a 2 bedroom flat and although a decent size, it's far from ideal for a family of 4. There is a clear incentive to move home.

I've never had such a large debt before. I do have spending sprees and I am manic with money but never to a point where I land myself in debt. It's usually a case of I buy loads of things in a short period of time then nothing for months so it evens out. I'd like to take a career break as I've been self-sufficient since I was 17 and I started a new job when my eldest son was only 2 months old as I didn't qualify for occupational maternity pay at the time. I then went to uni when he was 2 and both studied and worked during his early childhood. I carry guilt about this even though I know it was a positive thing to do.

We have £294,000 outstanding on the mortgage with a term of 30 years. The property needs approx £250k worth of work doing to it and once done, it will massively increase the value overall. The house is likely to be our forever home and is in a highly sought after area. Despite this we couldn't live in it as it is but equally don't have the money to renovate readily available either. My head tells me I should continue working but my heart tells me I should take this time to help our youngest DC who is likely to require extra help during the early years. I can't shake the thought that we have a mortgage to pay off and part of me just wants to get the planning approved and sell it so that we can buy something stress free. Hubby thinks it's all doable, however he often has an idealistic take on everything therefore I struggle to give weight to his reassurances. I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for with this post perhaps any of the following:

• any advice/experience on how you've funded large renovation projects

-any advice re: paying off your mortgage quickly and/or dealing with the worry of the debt

• advice around whether I'm insane to be considering a career break
• am I being unreasonable?

-any other words I need to hear

Thanks for listening.... I suppose I just needed somewhere to write down my thoughts. I appreciate that I've probably shared more than I needed to in some places and less than I should have in others! I suffer with anxiety and have a bit of a scatty brain when trying to explain things.

In the nicest way possible, this post is a little bit all or nothing (no offence because I’m trying to be kind) so perhaps change your mindset if you can? You can find middle ground on some, if not all of these things and then it’ll help it stop feeling like such a catastrophe. Would it be possible for you to work PT and see how that suits you? I’m aware that’s not an option for everyone / every job, but it would be a sensible one if it was doable.

As for the house, write down a list of things you would NEED to be able to live in it. So for example a bed would be a need whereas a fully decorated bedroom would be a want. Sit down with your DP and make a list, it’ll make it become a lot clearer for the two of you. There’s a lot of things you can work towards improving once you’re already in.

In a similar situation, we've bought a property that needs a huge amount of work, and both work full time with a baby. It feels very overwhelming, and we feel a bit stretched financially. So empathising with you, it doesn't feel nice.

What needs doing on your house? Can you do it in phases?

We have put our savings into the plumbing, and electrics are next. We are then planning to partition off the downstairs, and just live in the upstairs. We are getting one bathroom done, and decorating the rooms upstairs as best we can so we can live in them. The work downstairs needs planning etc, and the downstairs is in a pretty bad state, so we will tackle that later when we've saved some more. Kitchen will be a temporary set up in a bedroom. But ultimately we can't afford rent plus mortgage and renovations.

I'd also like to consider dropping a day at work if possible (stressful job plus commuting), but think I will focus on the house, and consider that later as an option

I agree with the previous poster in asking, when you say you couldn't live in the house as it is, what actually needs doing to get it to that point? Because you've said it needs all this masses of work and how it'll increase in value then, but also that it'll probably be your 'forever home' in which case its value is largely irrelevant (except perhaps insofar as it may allow you to borrow more on your mortgage - but you don't sound as though you're in a mindset where massively increasing your mortgage would be comfortable right now). If this is genuinely a home you expect to be in long term, my advice would be to slow things down - particularly given you don't have a financial plan in place for how to do all this work anyway.

What I'm also really hearing in your post is a lot of stress centred around your job, and I wonder whether some sort of change on the work front would be helpful for you. There are likely to be much less stressful jobs that would bring in the same income, for example, if you'd like to be working but not be burned out by it. It's okay to not be in the place to do the work you've previously done, given the other stresses you're under.

Your anxiety seems justified, It is unclear if you have enough money and building work is expensive at the moment.

Have you had an architect draw up plans already? Advise on the order of the work and whether it has to be done in a particular sequence/what could be done to make the house habitable? My friend plumbed a sink into the living room short-term while the rest of downstairs was being done and put the microwave, toaster, air fryer, kettle in there, so that they cooked/lived in the living room and upstairs had bedrooms and main bathroom.

If you live rent-free in the family flat, that is a good deal and you should see if you can get enough work done to make the House habitable and get big jobs like roof and rewiring done then move in asap. Explore taking out a second mortgage to get some of the works done - you may be better off doing that and then if you can’t cope with it all, sell the house in a few years’ time when the market may be better.

Your anxiety would reduce if you did a cash flow budget for the short-term (next year or so) and then a bigger plan longer term. Being in control of the finances always helps. Is DH at the top of his earning potential? Are you (let’s hope not!)? What are you prepared to cut back on or live with short-term to get this house into a habitable condition?

I know ideally you’d get all the work done before you move in as living in a building site with kids is hard. I certainly wouldn’t move into a building site if DC1 was coming up to exams in secondary school.

I struggle to understand why you would buy a doer-upper forever-home and put in 60% equity leaving yourself no cash for the renovation. Unless you inherited it and took out a mortgage to buy out another beneficiary’s share. In that case at least you’ve saved yourself stamp duty and that’s worth something as you will need a bigger home at some point in time it would be good to stick with this one.

And it may be hard to realise a good price selling the house in a time of falling property prices, if it’s in poor shape.

Your job sounds like a deal-breaker, £30k for an experienced graduate is a poor salary. Do you get subsidised childcare through work? I don’t even see how it would be worth you going to work, and forget the random hours of unpaid emergency overtime. Do you have better earning potential in another career?

I think as a first step you need to work out how much money you can set aside, both with and without you working, for your renovation pot, and then how long it would take in either situation for you to save what you need and then work out what is acceptable to you time wise.

I’d also be very cautious about estimating the cost of the work, have you had a builder in to have a look around?

Your husband is on a high wage and your mortgage relatively low. You're nit paying rent where you are either. It does my sound as though you've overstretched yourselves as you won't need that £250 000 straight away but in dribs and drabs.
As others have said, why not try part time. Just because your baby was born Prem doesn't automatically mean they'll need you more than your other child did.

I hear you on the work! It does sound as if you urgently need to be setting some boundaries at work and the simplest way of doing that would be to drop a day. An alternative if you're on acute care is to work short days - I worked 830 to 1 for 3 years and for a long time that did work really well. But if you're already unable to say no and walk away on time, that won't work for you.

What about leaving and setting up a private practice? I personally wouldn't feel able to do that but lots of my colleagues have, and they do look a lot more cheerful...

In terms of the work that needs doing, the kitchen is unusable for us in the state that it is in. It's not been changed since the early 1970's. The crittol windows need replacing as they have condensation between the glass, the roof requires repairing and the external walls re-rendering. The electrics will also need rewiring. The downstairs living area has good square footage but it is made up of lots of small rooms so we want to break down lot of the internal walls to make the space usable. The type of work that needs doing would make it quite difficult to live in the house whilst it's ongoing especially with a young baby. Once the building work is complete, we could live there and renovate the interior bit by bit.

The estimated cost of the work was a figure the architect suggested. I had thought the cost of the work would have been closer to £150k than £250k. We have £50k saved to pay for the works to start but ofc we will need much more than that to complete. We are still at the planning stage so don't have any finalised drawings. In terms of how much we could put a side each month without me working, it would be approximately £3k per month. With me working it would be £4.5k per month for the next year or perhaps a little less than that factoring in nursery costs.

In terms of my job, I don't know why I've stayed where I am for so long. I have a first class honours law degree and masters. I'm a qualified solicitor. I need to look for another career or workplace with a family friendly policy as my career will always need to sympathetic towards my husbands. He is often in and out / up and down the country so I need to be able to be around for the children.