One of the main reasons we decided
to look at buying a house in France was the cost. Our dream was to be mortgage
free – ironic really because as I write this we actually have both an English
and a French mortgage!
Anyway we looked at our finances, and we figured out that we could afford to be mortgage
free if we cashed in our pensions, sold the house, and paid off all outstanding debts but only if we bought a house at quite a bit less than the one we owned, in fact it
had to be less than half the value.
So we looked at the options in the
UK, with the only real area in contention being Lincolnshire as it was where I
come from and house prices there are much lower than Wiltshire where we were living.
Still the figures didn’t work, and we had considered moving to France before so
we began our search!
It all looked financially perfect
– but as is often the case where money is concerned things didn’t go quite
according to plan and although we put our house on the Market in early November
we had no-one to look at it at all in the first 4 and a half months – there’s a
lesson there to be had about choosing the right estate agent but that might
lead to me being accused of libel or slander so I’ll leave that subject alone! Change
of estate agents, one week later our first viewing, closely followed by an
offer, negotiations and a price agreed.
All sounds great you’re thinking,
but the truth of the matter was that the French purchase which had been agreed
way back in mid November, had progressed much quicker and we were tied to
completing on March 30th, and no way was the UK house sale going to
complete in time. So now what?!!
We had considered this possibility
and had met with our French banks' account manager way back in January. He had filled in the forms, been given lots
of bits of paper, proof of this that and the other, and had said, “Yes no
problem, a bridging loan. I’ll send you the confirmation next week….
Well we heard nothing for weeks,
despite chasing him and in the end FiB our wonderful estate agent effectively
threatened to camp out on his doorstep until he sorted it. It then transpired,
for whatever reason we are still not sure, that a bridging loan was not
possible, but a mortgage would be okay. Due to some cock ups by the same bank
manager the purchase had to be delayed to the 19th April.
Fortunately our vendors were brilliant and did not claim failure to fulfil the
contract and claim the 10% deposit (£10 000) but gave us the extra 20 days. They could have done according to French law, so be mindful of that when you set the completion date right at the beginning!
Anyway our bank man went on holiday and someone else sorted it all out for us and finally the money was available!
My advice - either sell yours before looking, borrow the money in the UK if you can (you can't get a mortgage for a French house in the UK by the way) or make sure that everything is well in place in time. It's possible we were unlucky with our accounts manager but believe me when I say it caused a huge amount of stress....
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