This post is part-helpful, part-update on what I’ve been up to. I feel like the blog has hit its minimum quota of thought pieces to cross-refer back to and I can afford to type up some stuff about what I’ve been up to.

Why we sold up

Regular readers shall recall that we started the year with an intended move to the Channel Islands that is now pretty much a certainty. You can read about it in my 2022 campaign plan and the subsequent update on the 2022 campaign plan.

Anyway, we had achieved 60% LTV on our house/ mortgage, so we considered renting this one out and restarting our life over there.

After much consideration – and, yes, there was quite a lot – we decided that this house in particular wasn’t suited to renting. It’s an old Victorian house that needs tons of upkeep, so managing that from across the Channel sounds like hell – for both us and our potential tenant.

If we did want to become landlords, my house is not the low-maintenance super-property of our landlordly dreams.

So, instead, we’re going the traditional “sell up and move on” route.

Finding a buyer

We had three valuations on our home lined up with reputable estate agents. That gave us a ballpark figure that I’ll talk about shortly.

It turned out we didn’t need any of their services.

Through dog walking, we learned that someone we knew was looking for a small family home as a single buyer following a divorce. Her needs matched our timeline for the move, so she asked if she could view the house.

We’ve done a lot of work to our home and the finish is reasonably good for the area. Standards in my city are low.

Suffice to say she fell in love with the place, and we were still painting at the time.

A second visit with the family, a walk-around tour where we pointed out all the problems with the house and how we’d managed them, and we had a buyer.

Pricing, valuations and profit

We paid a little under market price for our house, a little over five years ago. We chose the location carefully, so we can live without a car quite happily. In a city, but not in the busiest part; close to amenities; near a few decent daily dog walks.

The city we live in has since become popular with people moving out of London, and gentrification is hitting us hard. On top of that, the city has hit its limit for building new premises due to geographical factors.

Our house was valued at something around 50% over our purchase price. No joke.

So is that 50% profit..?

Well, no.

Part of the reason we made such big capital gains is that we’ve spent the last 5 years renovating the house.

If you factor in just the financial expenses, I think our gain is only about 30% above purchase.

Then there’s the mortgage repayments, capital and interest. That’s kind of controversial as if you’re not paying for a mortgage you’re generally paying rent.

I wouldn’t take this as “houses make money”. I’d take it as “buying a house in crap condition then adding value by making it a good house again makes money in the long term”.

What we plan to do now

We’re relocating to the Channel Islands for family reasons.

Initially, we wanted to advance the boat plan early by buying a boat and living in a marina for a few years while we get good at sailing.

We’ve even gone on viewing of prospective purchases and assessed that with our transferable DIY/ renovation skills we could quite comfortably live on a 37-foot sailing boat.

Unfortunately, liveaboard moorings are a rarity, and when we asked the marina on the island we’re moving to they pretty much said “good luck, we’ve even stopped operating a waiting list now”.

Instead, we’re looking at buying a (small) place for the next five years and considering splitting the pot to also invest in a buy-to-let. Fancy!

Wait… why didn’t you do an equity release before?

I’ve written long and hard about our success in overpaying the mortgage.

We could have used that money to invest in a buy-to-let sooner. However, when we started our financial independence campaign, we thought that we were going to basically semi-retire and set up lifestyle businesses or do weird projects.

The boat plan came in later. Originally, we were just going to travel a lot more and have remote jobs or freelance jobs we control.

Now that this is our main plan, we’re switching our income tactic from building a side business that we plan to run forever to going hard at well-paid employed jobs while looking at side hustles that might only be short term.

That’s a key tactical change that I’ll go into in a later post, but basically we’re selling out for the short term because hopefully our time horizon will be dramatically reduced when we geo-arbitrage out of the Channel Islands.

Cool stuff I learned as part of this process

1. DIY Skills.

We’ve done so much DIY now that I’m not really afraid of most home repairs.

Doing stuff like rigging your own plumbing system builds confidence for other practical skills. This is in the same way that writing blog posts has helped me be more persuasive when writing to clients at work: it’s not directly transferable, but practicing an allied skill definitely helps.

Also, colleague in the office (certainly in law) suddenly gain respect for you when you say things like “this weekend I learned how to replace cement roof tiles”. It’s a lot more interesting than “I binge watched the new Kenobi show on Disney Plus”.

I now feel pretty confident that although I’m not a great carpenter/ electrician/ plumber/ plasterer, I’m functionally OK for most maintenance jobs.

2. You don’t actually need an estate agent

Estate agents eat up around 1% of sale fees. If you sell your house privately, which is completely doable, you can pocket that difference. Nice one!

3. Networking in your community > social networking

I think this should be obvious to most people, but nevertheless my experience really emphasised this one truth: knowing people in real life is infinitely better than meeting like-minded people in single-interest internet communities.

If we hadn’t gotten to know all the other dog walkers in our local area, there’s no way we would have connected with our buyer.

At the moment I commute into London to work long hours in law. Most of my socialising is, err, at work. However, as I won’t have far to commute when I get to the Channel Islands, there’s loads of scope to join community groups and spread my real-life network with people who don’t all work as lawyers. I think I’m going to try a bit harder to get involved.

That’s all for today’s post!

I’m going to spend a bit of time working out exactly how to explain my changing strategy after we have relocated, which I acknowledged in the 2022 Campaign Plan and its update would need to happen, so bear with me. I have a 90% plan in place for the second half of 2022 but it’s not set in stone yet, so I’ll need a couple of weeks to get it finalised.

Thanks for stopping by!