I'm still feeling out of it after my tooth extraction, though thank goodness very little pain or swelling has occurred. Today I feel kind of strange, but it may just be the constant distraction of having stitches and a new hole in my mouth! Amazing how much that can affect concentration. Anyway, I'm just doing the bare minimum this week and hoping I'll feel normal soon.
I realized I forgot to record interest on the house/moving savings account last month, so I have a whopping $6.81 to record! Even though savings interest is admittedly abysmal, I still get kind of excited because up until a few years ago, I never had the discipline or money (so I thought) to even have a savings account, so the idea of making money on money without doing anything is kind of cool.
Anyway, that takes house/moving/renovation progress to $5950.69, and big picture progress to $22,973.06. Almost a quarter of the way to our goal!
I'll have to think about this more when I have a clearer head, but I've been pondering the possibility of taking another route besides our current one. Currently we plan to sell both places, hopefully making a profit on the UK place and breaking even on the US one, in order to help fund the new home purchase. But I've also idly thought what it would be like to keep renting out the UK flat and try to save up more money for a down payment on a new home vs. trying to fund it from the sale of the old one.
The UK flat rents for £725 per month now (US$1160), and we clear about £360 ($580) in a good month with no extra fees or repairs. It'll be worth 160,000 when renovations are done in a year or two, and we think we'll clear about £100,000 ($160,000) after paying off the mortgages and giving the management company their share of the profit. So it would take 23 years to make in rent what we could make in a sale; but, at the end of the 23 years, we'd still have a (possibly even more valuable) property (with the mortgage paid off).
I'm still leaning toward selling it. The rental income would be nice, but so would a smaller mortgage on our next house. But we'll see where we are in a year or two. Anything could happen in terms of raises, jobs, windfalls, expenses, etc. If I actually start thinking about it seriously, I'll be asking your perspectives for sure, but right now it's completely idle speculation.
Bit of big-picture progress and other rambles
August 7th, 2013 at 09:41 pm
August 8th, 2013 at 02:22 am 1375924939
August 8th, 2013 at 03:31 am 1375929106