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Financial Ponderings.
Nov. 1st, 2006 01:04 pmThe meeting at the bank last week gave us a price range to look at for houses. It was slightly less than I’d expected / would have liked and now I’m looking at what the options are. It turns out that the options are few & far between and the costs are quite staggering.
There is one on the other side of the road that’s slightly out of our price range (ie €20k – 40k above what we can borrow, but we’ll conveniently ignore that for now), but its downside – as far as we can tell – is that its got a tenant in residence in the lower part of the building. On speaking with a property developer who goes to my Dutch course, he told me a horror story where he had a tenant who he couldn’t get rid of, despite the fact that he was stealing electricity, who vandalised other peoples houses, sold hard drugs from his downstairs apartment & was abusive & violent. When this guy died, he still couldn’t get the property back, as his son inherited the tenancy – and carried on in the same way as his father!
So, assuming that the property with a tenant is a no-go (even if we had the money, which we don’t), I’m looking at houses in the €320,000 range and… there’s nothing worth even bothering with. The properties are – without exception – considerably smaller than the current place & are in desperate need of renovation & none of them are in the area we want to buy.
So, I dunno. Do I look further afield (not that I really want to as we’re starting to put down roots where we are), or do we just give up & stay where we are until we decide to move? Personally I want a house of my own; its money thats being saved up & not being thrown away. Ok the house in Leeds is a property that I own, but that’s the pension scheme – so its not a mortgage & a pension.
But I don’t know what to do. Either we magically find a lot of money from somewhere, or we move to an area that we don’t want to move to (it reopens the argument about Carole moving to Eindhoven, if we’ve got to move to a place that is inconvenient for both of us).
So I’m conflicted.
S
There is one on the other side of the road that’s slightly out of our price range (ie €20k – 40k above what we can borrow, but we’ll conveniently ignore that for now), but its downside – as far as we can tell – is that its got a tenant in residence in the lower part of the building. On speaking with a property developer who goes to my Dutch course, he told me a horror story where he had a tenant who he couldn’t get rid of, despite the fact that he was stealing electricity, who vandalised other peoples houses, sold hard drugs from his downstairs apartment & was abusive & violent. When this guy died, he still couldn’t get the property back, as his son inherited the tenancy – and carried on in the same way as his father!
So, assuming that the property with a tenant is a no-go (even if we had the money, which we don’t), I’m looking at houses in the €320,000 range and… there’s nothing worth even bothering with. The properties are – without exception – considerably smaller than the current place & are in desperate need of renovation & none of them are in the area we want to buy.
So, I dunno. Do I look further afield (not that I really want to as we’re starting to put down roots where we are), or do we just give up & stay where we are until we decide to move? Personally I want a house of my own; its money thats being saved up & not being thrown away. Ok the house in Leeds is a property that I own, but that’s the pension scheme – so its not a mortgage & a pension.
But I don’t know what to do. Either we magically find a lot of money from somewhere, or we move to an area that we don’t want to move to (it reopens the argument about Carole moving to Eindhoven, if we’ve got to move to a place that is inconvenient for both of us).
So I’m conflicted.
S
