We're nearly there selling my flat. Exhange today, complete tomorrow.
..Well, that's if both sets of solicitors can actually drag themselves away from the golf course, pull their fingers out and actually do something with a modicum of the commerical urgency by which most of us operate professionally.
This development though ushers the unravelling a financial arrangement of monumental complexity. A vertitable house of cards.
We will have some capital released. We will re-mortgage and thus remove the incredibly painful bridge. We will have a single mortgage on a single property. Simple really. But for the last 10 months we've carried two mortgages and the bridge. Ouch!
But before we can do this we need to have our house valued. The bank lends against the value of the brick put up as collateral, not what you earn and/or can afford. And of course, it would be wrong for it to lend today against its December 2005 price.
So we invite all the (ehem) reputable local estage agents over to value our shabby little home. And what's uttlerly amazing is how, by their assessment, the house has shot up in value over the past 10 months. Over 25 percent!
I know it's all about supply and demand and everyone wants to live in Stokie and there just aren't enough available places. But even so -- this is crazy.
So, does this mean that we're rich?
Hell no. The equity on the flat will disappear and we'll have a bigger (single) mortgage. Though on paper at least, the sizeable difference between the mortgage loan and the salable value is, in effect, profit.
But that's not for blowing on a lifestyle of the rich and famous and we're a long way from taking early retirement.
No, the dosh is for ploughing into the next move as the deposit on an even bigger debt.
The crying shame though is that we're among an increasingly small number of Brits able to be on 'the ladder' at all -- however slippy and steep it is.
