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Earlier in the week I watched a show about Britain’s most expensive homes and I am inspired. It happens every time me and my wife sit down to watch anything about the super-wealthy, but it was especially interesting this time around for one very important reason: we think we’re finally buying a house next year. 2021 is the year. It’s been a very long time coming, but me and Hollie are finally in a position to slap down a healthy deposit on a place that we can say is truly ours.

It’s a really interesting time to buy a home for so many reasons, particularly what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the way that people work. So many people are now rethinking their home situations and considering moving to places with more space, better transport and more convenience, as so many workplaces are moving away from strict office-based roles.

The shift towards more people working from home means that there are many benefits to people with everyday jobs, but for those that have been working from home for some time already – like myself – and now want mortgages, it means that they’re facing steeper prices, more competition and a different housing landscape than 12 months ago.

Professionals are moving out of the cities where their jobs are based, because their roles don’t demand that they turn up to their workplace at 9am every morning anymore. Many tasks can be completed from the comfort of their homes, so lots of people are looking to move towards more suburban locations (as I have) and get the kind of space where they can afford spare rooms for things like offices, home gyms and other activities that they would usually otherwise conduct out of their home.

Based on the current set-up we have, we know for a fact that we couldn’t go any smaller with a home. It must have four bedrooms. It must have a study. It must have a garage. It must have a garden. If we have all of these things on our wishlist, we just know that others will too, and it’s only going to get harder to secure these kinds of places, when other families will be looking for places with exactly the same criteria.

This particular mortgage calculator has been such a help for me in figuring out how best to approach the situation, how to ensure we get approved quickly and how to pay off as much as possible as soon as possible. I’ve been aware that you can overpay your mortgage, but I never considered that there were structured processes to do this. I thought that you had to pay monthly, but this made me realise that if we planned to make bi-weekly mortgage payments, we would be able to chip away at the mortgage much more frequently.

MortgageCalculators.info – how it works

One of the biggest revelations for me and Hollie this year are the many different ways that we can boost our initial house deposit and the one thing that has our attention more than any other is StepLadder, which encourages you and a group of others to pay into a pool which pays out the complete pot to someone within that group each month. We haven’t yet started, but it’s at the top of our to-do list for next year to make moves towards securing our house.

Now we have a motivational tool for the deposit, a practical tool for assessing our future house expenses, we feel as though there’s nothing stopping us in our quest to make 2021 the year we finally get on that property ladder and go from having an online empire to beginning our offline one too.

Chiino
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