Hello! I was hoping there may be some creative ideas that I've not thought of that some of you may know about or done yourself to be able to obtain a property to raise a family that is slightly out of reach.
Our situation: we have been looking for ~5 years to relocate to a better area to raise our family in a nicer neighbourhood with better schools. We finally found that area 1 year ago and have been looking since then to find a workable house within the catchment of the good high school, which is one of the main drivers for choosing this location (although there are more). However, the house prices are premium level within the catchment. The house we require would be a 3-bed with office or 4-bed with one room being used as an office as I work from home.
We have seen a house that is 4-bed that is slightly over budget and just slightly out of the nearly guaranteed catchment for the school, but there is still a small chance they could get in.
The house is perfect for us and by the far the nicest we have seen in so long that could work for our family size wise and it is at a good price I think (although still slightly more than we want to pay - there is no negotiation on the price).
I freelance so my income is not guaranteed. However, I earn more than my partner so I figured it would make sense for me to work a bit more and he work part time so help with the school runs, which I currently do, so I won't be working every evening which has been hard. However, as we will be relocating his income is unknown at the moment. I know this sounds risky but I could alway go back to permanent if times got desperate but I would like to avoid this if at ALL possible.
We are hoping to create a better work-life balance without putting us under financial duress. I do not know if this would be possible for us. It seems as though we need to choose: either both work lots to give the children the nice family home, area, and good school OR work less but live on top of each other, no garden etc etc.
Puzzle: is there any way at all we can make this work?
I was thinking one way could be this, but I wanted to sense check if this would be a possibility and feasible/not against mortgage rules etc:
- Could we secure the house with a 2 year mortgage, stay it in a year, probably eat into my pension savings a bit to pay some of the mortgage. Then could we rent it out for a year (changing the mortgage to a BTL? - how easy is that?) in which time we would rent a place for a year closer to the high school to ensure admission. Then after that year move back into the property and hopefully the mortgage rates would have come down and we would be more settled in terms of knowing what income we have and at that point know if we can afford it. If not I guess we would have to sell?
- The other option is staying in the house for 2 years on a 2-year mortgage deal, use my pension savings to sub us, which would probably use most of it tbh :( if my partner won't earn enough, but when we resell we could maybe make it back as it seems a good price and needs a little work which we could do so maybe that could make a profit to pay back the pension pot?
Does anybody have any ideas or is there just no way around this?
Thank you so much for reading xx