Owning your own home

heehee, cheers guys. Love how Ludwig set himself up for some sick burns. Good work all

I want to move to Scotland.
Have I been in lockdown too long?
Is living on an island a sensible idea?

Yes - do it. My suggestions are Soay, Muck, or Sanda Island, if you really want to get off grid. Buy a RIB and your own creel pots and eat crab, lobster and fresh mackerel everyday.

Is living on an island a sensible idea?

No.

No.

I'm living on one now.

I am a rock.
I AM A OWL.
Wait.
That's not right.

I'd like the Maidstone house, with a double garage and workshop, just on the outskirts of Haslemere, for £500k.

I can appreciate the architecture of that house in Maidstone. To me though it just looks like an old house with a shit kitchen and shit bathroom that the current owner is too tight to replace and bring up to modern standards. Surely noone would actually want to spend that sort of money and live with a kitchen and bathroom like that. It just seems like a way of punting on an old nail that prob needs a shed load of cash spent on it under the guise of it being vaguely architecturally interesting .

I was looking at it and wondering about how to update it, and thinking I'd likely want to put the existing cooker into storage in order to have the option of putting it back to make the whole place period correct. I'd fix everything, and put modern stuff in - but it'd be behind doors that matched the rest of the kitchen.

Buying trendy jeans is one thing, buying a trendy house is something else

Biggest problem with all of this is the falling knife issue, all of the advertised prices may be literal fiction by the time the market staggers back onto its feet.

You definitely mean the Maidstone one and not the Haslemere shed?

To me the Maidstone one looks like it was a quality spec / #40kkitchen build, that was good enough that the owners didn't feel the need to update.

I mean look at those cabinets and surfaces, then think of what you're average kitchen looks like 5yrs on. Reminds me a bit of France where the fad of replacing or updating your kitchen and bathroom constantly seems to have passed them by.

Yep I’ll take one of those too

Definitely the Kent one. I've seen more attractive kitchens and bathrooms in prisons.

What did you get done for?

DIY?

http://www.uklanddirectory.org.uk/land-for-sale.asp?id=74860

I think it needs Grade 2 listing then purchased by English Heritage for all to enjoy and visit in the future..
But i would live in in like that if it was mine :)

Professional visitations

Back to one of the reasons that I wish to move, the ongoing legal situation with the service charge;

The service charge for H1 2020 is £1387.29, so dividing that equally over Q1 and Q2 gives a charge per quarter of £693.66.

We're being pursued for arrears of £711.88, of which if I had not suspended the standing order ~£687 would have been paid on the 25th of March (this was the H2 2019 figure, which we'd not updated inline with the increase in the service charge to reflect the actual H1 2020 figure).

I suspended the standing order because the solicitor stated in their letter that if I had allowed the payment to be made (to the account of the managing agent) I'd be liable for a £95 charge.

Now, we are in Q2, and the standing order for the 25th of June has been revised to pay £693.66 (inline with the H1 2020 service charge, which would have left (genuine) arrears of £18.22 on the 26th of June.

I have therefore paid the £18.22 today, and the standing order will pay the remainder of the H1 2020 service charge on schedule on the 25th of June.

My plan is to call Brady's solicitors tomorrow and inform them that:

a) I've paid the £18.22, so the outstanding balance is precisely half the H1 2020 service charge
b) And that will be paid on schedule by standing order on the 25th of June
c) Therefore I consider the matter to be closed, as despite repeated requests they have not shown that I am in arrears, and everything is scheduled to be paid on time, as per my agreement with Martin back in late 2010/early 2011
d) I would like a letter from them confirming that this entire discussion is at an end

Does this sound reasonable?

Yes it does but you need to stand by your assertion that you consider it closed (and put it all in an email rather than a call)

They will not pursue you for this it is simply not worth their time or effort given the ambiguity over the chronology of events.

Years ago I used to do a bit of debt recovery when I was starting out and the main tool in the debt recovery solicitors toolbox is the instillation of fear in the alleged debtor.Fear of the unknown, fear of processes they don't understand, fear their credit record will be impacted, fear Bailiffs will turn up and take the TV. We used to send them a filled in claim form (not issued at court so it was absolutely worthless and had no weight at all) and say at the bottom of the letter this will be issued shortly. It hardly ever was because people used to piss themselves and pay up- they were holding a claim form and it looked official even though it was absolutely meaningless at that point.

You therefore need to stand by your assertion it's over as far as you are concerned and not reply to any correspondence over this from hereon in. That is absolutely critical.

Take legal advice

Quite possibly because I'm a moron I'd be (in some ways) welcome going to court, which takes the fear out of it for me.

Thanks for the advice, I'll email them. Out of courtesy I'd like to all the person I've been dealing with simply to follow up on the email - bad idea?

If they do send more correspondence, should I forward it to the managing agent, the board of directors, or just bin it?

Buy the shonky one in Haslemere (nice area, have friends there, good riding etc...) knock it down, and design & build something yourself.

If you call after, it's probably worth reaffirming anything else mentioned on that call over email after too.