Stretch for forever home or stay put and have more financial security/freedom?

[Birchwoods]

I’m interested to hear what others have done/would do. We live in a lovely four bedroom, detached extended house but with a fairly small garden on a road of 1970s semis. The house is great and size isn’t an issue, but we’ve never seen it as our forever home. We have a good household income, DH is a high earner, and 20 yrs ago would’ve been able to buy a big house on a large plot, but as salaries have not kept up with the cost of living, we’re in a fairly modest property.

There’s a house that we know will be coming in the market soon, less than 50m from ours but overlooking the common, with gates and a huge garden. A proper forever home. But we would stretch ourselves financially if we bought it. It would need some work (garage conversion to create a bigger kitchen) but it would be an investment and 20 yrs ago the owner got planning consent for a building plot at one end of the garden, so that would potentially be an option in the future.

if we stay where we are we will never have the garden we dreamed of and would feel a bit like “is this it?” but if we move we won’t have as much disposable income and we’d have to extend our mortgage term. Although that would probably be reduced in 10-15 years if we got planning for the plot in the garden and sold it. DH will be 45 this year so if we’re going to make the move it really needs to be this year. There aren’t really any other suitable properties in this area, and we’d like to stay here because of schools etc. For info purposes house would probably sell for £575k-ish and the house we like would be around £750k. Any other properties we’ve seen are more expensive than ours but it would be a sideways move as they’re not any bigger and it’s a big leap to the next level of house that would be worth moving to.

Any advice or wisdom appreciated!

We moved in 2020 and mortgage was to be about £400 more. Enter Liz Truss and now it’s £800 more and it’s killing us. If we’d stayed put we’d be £700 a month better off and debt free.

Depends if you can absorb an unexpected increase.

Have you spoken to a Mortage advisor? I’d do that and then you are working with actual figures.

Then check your family budget. Look at all your ins and outs. How much does life currently cost you?

Do you have savings?

Have you spoken to an estate agent to gets yours valued?

We’ve recently moved from comfortable 3 bed detached to a larger 4 bed detached and more than doubled our mortgage. Similar age too. I’m so happy that we did it, I wake up every morning and can’t believe how lucky we are to be here. We absolutely could have stayed in our old home, we all loved it but never really saw us staying there forever so was felt unsettled. Now we’ve moved we all feel more settled and absolutely love the house. Yes we are more stretched and yes our mortgage has been extended, but neither worries me too much. I don’t want to retire early, I like working and if at 60 we decide we need to, we can downsize if needed to do that.

Stay put. That's what we did and never regretted it. No mortgage after age 40, and able to invest for our retirement (and have some great holidays). If your house is big enough, OP, why waste your money on something more expensive?

We stretched to our forever home five years ago. Similar difference in price to you OP. The importance to us was that it is suitable for us to grow old in.

We have two sitting rooms, one of which has a downstairs toilet and shower room next door so could be turned into a bedroom and still leave us with the other much larger sitting room. The plot itself is perfect, in a friendly village but with no overlooking neighbours or noise and it's only a short drive or taxi to GP and hospitals. Lovely part of the country so even though it was a stretch, it was definitely worth it. I can see myself being fine here when I'm elderly, even if I'm on my own.

We’ve got an appointment booked with a mortgage advisor but my husband has done lots of calculations and has a good idea of what the mortgage would be.

We’ve had ours valued and have been advised to put it on at £585 with a view to getting £575k.

At the moment I’m paying £600-£700 per month in nursery fees, which I won’t be paying any more from Sept as my youngest DD starts school, so that would free up some money.

It would be an investment so I don’t think it would be a waste of money. We could add a lot of value to it. And at the moment we don’t have space for our children to have a trampoline and we have close neighbours. The other garden has lots of fruit trees, mature trees, space for the children and dog to play, the option of selling off a chunk of it in the future to claw back some of the additional expense. We don’t feel completely fulfilled where we are now. We could stay here but I feel we might regret not pushing ourselves to get the home we always imagined we’d have, like we’ve stagnated. DH is always thriving to do better and climb up the ladder so I think he’d feel unsatisfied with this being our home forever, despite it being a lovely house.

It’s interesting you use words like “fulfilled” and “stagnating.” A bigger house might or might not be useful, but I doubt it will make you feel fulfilled. And if your husband needs ever bigger houses to feel he’s progressing in life, won’t he just want an even bigger one in five years after he’s bored of this one?

I’m also sceptical of the idea of a “forever house” particularly if what you mean by that is “a big house with lots of land.” The saddest estate agents listings are normally the big house probate sales, because you can so often tell that the house was lived in by an old person who wasn’t able to maintain it, and it was falling down around then. If you live to a good age you’re very likely to find a big house unmanageable by the end.

Don’t stretch. You’ll be miserable. Lifestyle is important.

I'd stay put and be better off, but then I don't believe there is such a thing as a "forever home".

(Not unless it's somewhere like Blenheim Palace.)

I'd stay where you are. There's nothing wrong with your house except the garden is small. Circumstances change and it could become unaffordable and make life less fun.

I’d stay. Large properties take a lot of maintenance. Imagine the stamp duty, moving costs and then the costs of any renovations you want to do- even just repainting and new carpets adds up. A large garden takes a lot of time too- or paying someone. Increased mortgage. Increased bills. And property isn’t always an investment - it simply cannot keep increasing as it has the last 20 years, there will be a tipping point.

However, all these replies will certainly help you realise what you truly want even if it’s not what everyone else says. And you don’t always have to make the sensible choice in life.

How much disposable income will be reduced? And if this is offset by the £600 childcare fees then how much?

How long have you got left to pay of mortgage on this house now.

Some more info would help.

Do you without giving figures already have good pensions, fairly good amount invested, savings etc. That could be used as a fall back if one of you lost your jobs..

Funny, pre Covid threads like this always went the same way iir- stretch yourself now, reap the benefits later etc etc I remember it so well. Especially when I was looking to buy first time around 10 years ago. We moved a year ago and stretched ourselves.

the house absolutely brings so much benefit, doubled the space, detached, better area etc. we’ve no regrets but there’s no denying that we didn’t have money worries before whereas right now I’d say we feel things are more precarious with less room for error if interest rates shot up again. But then by the time we’d decided to bite the bullet our mortgage rate had expired and it jumped up £400 and that mega pissed me off… to be paying so much more pm on a house we’d slaved over the add value to AND was no longer suitable.. Surely the whole point is to own more and pay less as the years go by! So we honestly thought sod this, rather pay 900 more pm on a house that had loads of potential- we’d really topped out at value where we were by then, suffer a few years and stretch and hope for the best.

if we’d completed the renovations today and sold tomorrow I think we’d have added £125k minimum. So I guess time will tell.

we could easily stay here forever if we wanted to.

If your kids are still young I’d go for it. A big house where they can grow up in/play around, have memories of later.
We had to move out of ours and I’ve not found that ‘home’ feel elsewhere since.

Personally, no I wouldn’t. Not in this day and age with the current unemployment rate and the march of AI.

We did this 3 years ago and have no regrets. We renovated 2 houses before and I expected to not be able to move again but somehow we managed it. We have a very large mortgage, but this is my dream/forever house and we won’t move again until we downsize. We see it as an investment as well (as much as our pensions) as when we do eventually downsize we’ll make good money due to the works we’ve done. Having said that I hope we won’t downsize for a good 15-20 years when we’re retiring.

I think the PP’s question about how it will affect your disposable income is an important one. We are both higher earners and whilst we pay a lot on our mortgage/renovations the house is liveable so we can take time doing different parts of the house and we can still afford to go on holiday etc (not super luxury ones but that’s fine). If moving had meant we’d never be able to go on holiday and our son couldn’t do his sports clubs etc then we would have stayed put. He doesn’t go to private school so that’s not an added pressure.

Holidays and luxuries are great, but ultimately you spend the vast majority of time at home so for me living here is more important than spending lots on things which are more short lived. Also whilst we don’t have as much money to save/spend on luxuries, if there was an interest rate hike we could still afford it and that’s an important consideration as well.

You put me right off your £750k forever home when you said the first thing you'd have to do is a garage conversion to extend the kitchen .... messy!

(I've been looking at K&P love it or list it, loving it - making the kitchen bigger, usually cost £75,000 plus)

i think a bigger garden is a big draw though and something you can’t change in your existing home.

True. But it sounds like the plan is to sell half of it off to a developer (thus blighting the big house forever).

Selling part of the garden is going to affect your mortgage going forward as it will devalue the property.

I would stay put.
There are a lot of uncertainties in the world today - political (Greenland, Iran, Taiwan, Colombia etc), technological (effects of AI on the job market), economic (interest rates). Many pundits are predicting a market crash ahead (by 2027) similar to or worse than 2008.
I'd stay put, enjoy your children/home/holidays etc , and not put yourselves under a lot of financial pressure.

I would stay put.
There are a lot of uncertainties in the world today - political (Greenland, Iran, Taiwan, Colombia etc), technological (effects of AI on the job market), economic (interest rates). Many pundits are predicting a market crash ahead (by 2027) similar to or worse than 2008.
I'd stay put, enjoy your children/home/holidays etc , and not put yourselves under a lot of financial pressure.

i would say go for it. You have just listed enough reasons above. Life is for living! The extra money from the sale of the plot and nursery fees will,go a long way to help. Please let us know what you decide in the end.

Stay and get mortgage cleared quickly. Be mortgage free. We are glad to not have that worry every month.