Buying a holiday home before a primary home?

[ladyquef]

We love a coastal town in my home country (Scotland). It’s about an hour from my parents.

Due to work, we have to be in London, but it looks like we will end up moving to Singapore or Dubai (we’re financiers). We don’t want to spend £1m on the kind of flat we’d want to live in long term in London. But we also want a home/base we can fall back on, spend time in etc. So we were thinking of buying a ‘holiday home’ back in Scotland. My parents would use it a lot, and it is not in an area with a housing shortage. The idea is that we could buy á reasonable place and not be burdened by a massive mortgage.

Has anyone done this?

It’s cheaper for sure to buy in Scotland - much more than London and even if you did decide to stay - flights from Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow take less than an hour into London airports so wouldn’t be an issue to commute.

If it makes sense for you… do it!

If in the future you do want to buy in London it will mean that is a second home so your stamp duty will rocket on what will be your more expensive purchase but if in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t worry you, fine!

Haven't done the holiday home first but did live in both Singapore and Dubai and I would 💯 recommend Singapore over Dubai. Dubai is not a nice place to live for a plethora of reasons, no amount of money could ever persuade me to go back there.