Wednesday 11 May 2016

In England to find a home


Happy Dream Dog

Me and my wife are now in England for a week to try to find a new home. This is the first time I am making a serious move with a life partner and I had for this reason not the experience regarding it... It is hard. Things that I do not see, would not see, would not care about she does. She also have a clear opinion about what must be present in this house / apartment.... So... what would personally have taken me maximum three apartments visits before deciding now takes much, much longer time.

It should be repeated here that the plan is to stay for maximum one year in the rented apartment before buying a house. For living somewhere during one year time I really do not care what it look like but she does and for this reason it is also important that we find something that she will like even if it takes a bit longer time.

There are so many nice little villages in the UK and the distances are nothing if traffic runs smoothly. For this reason we are trying to find a nice place in one of those little villages.

Today we will go and see a very promising town house! It is a bit on the expensive side (600 GBP) but it is only 18 km to work and with good traffic it will take 20 minutes to get there with a car. A car is a must here and we will be forced to buy two of them directly in the beginning. I am already worrying about all the costs that we will have to carry during this first month.... the move will be around 5k € to that can be added that we need to start two cash ISA and pay in 2.4k GBP... since we do not have a credit record here in the UK we might even end up being forced to pay the first half year in rent even before entering the apartment... to that comes fees in the size of 300 GBP... and of course the two cars... flights... hotels... etc. etc. It really feels like a never ending story. Besides from the cars and the fees the money will not be lost but they will still need to be brought out on the table during this first month.

Do I have the money? Yes, I do but it is in stocks and I have no intention of selling stocks to pay for my move. Anyway... we will manage since I planned a little a head and started to build up cash.

So... Greetings from the UK - the future home for My Contrarian Adventure.

3 comments:

Martin said...

Did you try myhammer.de for getting additional offers for the move? Helped me a lot to bring costs down.

Fredrik von Oberhausen said...

Hi Martin!

Yes, we did indeed follow your excellent advice and we received offers from 3k up to 5k € so we almost managed to half the cost!

Thank you Martin!

Martin said...

I am glad I could help. I keep fingers crossed that you find a decent house for you two. From my own experience, it is very important to find something the wife approves. This was always a very important point for me when we switched locations due to my work.
Happy wife, happy life. I guess it was you who told me that :)