Although the concept of a ‘starter home’ exists in the US, it is not drummed into Americans that a ‘forever home’ must eventually be attained, only after working your way through a list of greater fools. The housing situation here is easily my biggest complaint, and yes, I realise the UK could fit inside Texas with room to spare. Still, it’s a kind of madness which it may take a non-native to truly appreciate.
Don’t thank me, I’m an estate agent. It’s my job to fuck everybody.
As my DW put it, “What’s intriguing is how people’s minds work.”
I have a bit of a nuts idea, I’d just like some advice about whether or not it could be done. We are looking to move house and have found a property on the market for £700,000 our current house is worth roughly £340k we’d make about £120k so we’d need a mortgage of £600k. We do not have a big income at all, I’m a SAHM and DH is a teacher. The thing is the property we’re looking at has a swimming pool which the current owners hire out to swim/dive schools apparently making £3000 a month. They also say that they often turn people down, so it could be possible to make even more income from the pool. This income could therefore cover the mortgage payments.
Do you think any bank would lend us the money to buy this house? Or am I being completely stupid?
Thanks for any opinions.
Opinions are well and good, but here’s a man with a plan:
I’ve a solution for this SAHM, that would completely solve her dilemma – get her the house and pay for the upkeep of the swimming pool. It’s delightfully straightforward and the strategy is as good as foolproof.
All that’s required is a carefully baked batch of cup-cakes, and a trip to Libya… then feed a bad cup-cake to Gadhafi… and, while he’s choking on the crumbs… claim the $1.7m reward. This currently equates to £1,037,914 – which is sufficient both to buy the new place (with swimming pool); to pay off the mortgage on the old house (which can be let out to cover pool cleaning costs) and plops £100K in the bank to pay for incidentals.
It’s a no-brainer, go-go-cup-cake-baking-for-Gadhafi-capture!
The snark is warranted, because once upon a time a bank would probably have quite happily lent them the money, and as we seem hellbent on ignoring moral hazard, we all would have contributed to the bailout made necessary by schemes like this spread across a population encouraged to climb at any cost. In any case, the OP has but to reread her own post, bracketed with appropriate warnings.
Even if it’s just a daydream or wind-up, we’ve gotten ourselves into such a state that it’s entirely believable someone would give this serious consideration.
Image credit: DW. (Crummy captioning job, six-years-ago-sam.) That’s me in my neighbour’s pool, before maintenance became a casualty of their shrinking pool of discretionary income and it started blooming algae.
Nearly posted on Mumsnet:
I recently started a thread on a notorious site full of advocates for a less than gentle landing for house prices, putting a spotlight on certain mumsnet posts. Figured I’d
wander over here with a target on my backaccept any brickbats in person.First, note that I am not in any way affiliated with the owner, whoever they are. I suspect they’re headquartered in the Caymans, relaxing in a volcano lair insulated with bitcoins.
Maintains a diverse portfolio of evil and nonevil enterprises
They have, in fact, adversely altered the course of my life by providing a platform for persuasive people who convinced me, years ago, that a crash was imminent; thus I did not buy and am not now sitting on a pile of equity along with DW.
When the crash failed to materialise I figured these persuasive people were still right, it was RL that was wrong. This is a view I still hold. I am no longer expecting a crash, in fact studiously avoid any “good” news that points in that direction, preferring to be pleasantly surprised if it comes to pass, hopefully before I’m dead but after also works.
The main HPC arguments I would put forward are these:
– Houses are too expensive
– This is a bad thing
There is a surprising amount of resistance to both of those propositions, and rather a lot of pushback on the only cure that seems possible. I understand negative equity is no picnic. On the other hand, I fail to see how that pain is worse than being locked out of the housing market, and consider the idea of a kinder gentler freeze an insult to those already patiently living in the cold.
That’s as far as I got before slapping sense into myself
Neighbours from hell