‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ The surveyor shook his head. It would take me longer to boil the kettle than for him to do a valuation of my 400 sq ft, one-bedroom flat. I paced awkwardly around. A minute later, he gave me the thumbs-up. Valuation complete, he left. I boiled the kettle anyway.
Four years after the purchase of the flat, via the ‘Help to Buy: Equity Loan’ scheme, I couldn’t be more desperate to sell. Would I make a profit? I just want to escape its clutches and avoid a loss. Why sell? Let’s start at the beginning. Why buy?
Perhaps it was an early midlife crisis. At nearly 30 years old, I thought it time to leave the familial roost. It was unfair on my parents to have me, the resident ghost daughter, living at home for ever. I was single and had spent years flip-flopping between living at home and renting with friends. Now, my friends were either married, living abroad or on such high salaries that I could no longer afford to rent with them.
The timing was right but only one conundrum remained. Money. As a teacher, I hardly earned big bucks. My bank’s mortgage limit at the time was my annual salary multiplied by 4.5. My maximum mortgage allowance was £170,000. In London, this opened few doors. A property search engine delivered fruitless findings: long boats, parking spaces or retirement homes. Shared ownership was out of the question because my salary was too low.
Then Help to Buy came along. Looking back, I wish I’d never heard those three words. Like many bad ideas, it sounded good at the time. It provided a tailor-made, first-time buyers’ solution, designed for poor millennials like me. The guidance on Gov.uk
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