Diet Diary – Day 6 – And House Buying

Oh dear.  Had a really difficult weekend with some personal issues coming to the fore which sent things a bit haywire. Well a lot haywire. 

My partner and I found a lovely house we wanted to buy.  We’d already put our two houses on the market and sold them.  But to afford the house I also needed to sell another house I own in Cumbria (north England) quickly.  Don’t know what house selling is like where you are but certainly in that area things are really stagnant.  Nothing’s selling.  So to get the money together we would have to go to one of the companies who buy quickly at less than market value.

The upshot of that was that I would get about £15,000 (sterling) less for the house than I wanted.  This means a loss on my investment.

Added to this, my partner’s contract is changing at the end of February and the length of the contract after that is uncertain.  So we decided we had to hang on to my Cumbria house because we own it outright.  At least if everything went ‘pop’ tomorrow, we could live there almost cost-free.

This means that we can’t get together the deposit we need to get the best mortgage interest rate for the new house.  It also means the mortgage term (length of years) we can get is less than we thought.  This pushes the mortgage cost up by 50% on what we would have been paying.  It also would tie up all our capital in a new house at a time when Robin’s job is changing.

We looked at this every way we could over the weekend.  Every single permutation was considered.  We finally came to the conclusion that there was too much financial risk to purchase another house.  It was heartbreaking because it was a dream house.  We have instead decided to set a goal for the amount of money we want to have invested/banked by the end of 2012 so we can go and buy a dream house outright instead.

In all of that we took a 12 hour return journey on Saturday to go up to Cumbria to review the situation.  So we are shattered.  Enotionally and physically.  And my eating took a nosedive.  I’ve decided that I’m releasing being an emotional eater.  I’ve changed my mind about who I am and decided that my eating is defined by my need for food, not my emotional state. It doesn’t help and it doesn’t solve the problem.

Now I have to tell the estate agent the news.