Sell Up & Sail

Today the first estate agent came to value our house, which commenced a frantic hour of dashing around cleaning and tidying this morning. We bought on a new estate and had thought that buying early in the release would be a good investment. However, the prices haven’t gone up in the year since we bought, I guess our timing to sell though is not ideal, the full site will only complete in December this year which would probably have a better effect on price.

So we were a bit disappointed on the valuation, no loss, but no gain either, we are trapped around the stamp duty boundary which makes profits difficult. Anyway, we have another valuation booked for Friday morning, so I guess we’ll see what they say. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, buying this nice new bigger house was supposed to settle us down make us happier to stay in the rat race a little longer - then we hadn’t really justified to ourselves that we could go sooner rather than later. In that respect it worked, we have had another year’s earning and saving now, but we realise we fell into the peer pressure / marketing trap which sees so many people in masses of debt now. Kevin has been through the entire buying big houses trap and had come out of the other side to downsize before we met. Then when I sold my house and we got somewhere together I decided we needed the spare room for guests etc etc. Then getting up everyday at 5am to commute from Preston to Leeds returning at 8pm kicked in and the only other people up earlier than I was were those in the even bigger houses. So I admit now I was wrong, there is more to life than this. Kevin just had his 2 year old LandRover Defender valued too, don’t even get us started on the waste of buying expensive cars! To think that on a boat you can pretty much live on what people lose in depreciation on their cars is a revelation that most people don’t wake up to I guess.

Also, the ongoing eBay selling, we currently have 28 items listed and just discovered a few books etc this morning to start adding. It is a great service and will probably add a fair bit to the pot which would have been lost just giving things away. However, it is very time consuming, Alex is with us this week and has been brilliant working really hard to get everything listed and answer all of the questions you get including…
[Oxygen/Helium Analyser] Does this analyse Oxygen too?
[3.4m Ladders] Can you post them?
We aren’t complaining, some things have sold for more than we paid for them and it’s keeping us amused guessing the daft questions we might get!