It’s been so long since I have posted but it is for good reason… because we moved house!!  (Big long detailed post warning - it has been a big few months so it is hard to write a short post)

DH has wanted to move to the country forever and it has taken me a long time to come around to the idea. Probably about 7 years of discussions, so it is not something we have taken lightly.  As time went by and more family and friends moved  away I found that I was ok with moving. It was still hard but we are only an hour away from home - well, our old hometown where we grew up. 

While DH has wanted to move to the country for a long time, I have wanted to have an investment property for a long time, for years, and in our discussions over the years we talked about renting out our home that we had for years. 

In April our home loan’s fixed rate ended so DH wanted to move forward with these plans, especially because we didn’t have our elderly pets anymore (previously when thinking of doing this they were around 15-16 and one of our girls was blind, so we didn’t want to put them through unnecessary stress so delayed the plans), so we started looking and found a nice place a week later. So all of a sudden, after all this time, we were moving!

It took me a while to get my head around, but really, people do it all the time, so just had to move forward. We did get a really beautiful house, it is in a housing estate just out of town, it is all very lovely. The town is near the mountains, so it is a very pretty drive and we have a view of the mountains from our back window, which is super cool! 

Financially this has not turned out to be the best decision, but it’s all to do with our age. DH is the higher wage earner and he has exactly 20 years to retirement so we must ensure that the home loans are repaid by this point. I have about 23 years but currently earning much less so everything is based on his earnings. 

We were able to keep our previous home as a rental, we had to enlist a broker to do the numbers and the loan applications though. Our plan if all goes well is to keep our previous home as a rental for a decade, make the loan payments in the meantime, and then hopefully sell it for a nice price and make a big repayment off the loan in our new place. 

Of course, when we started this process there was not any interest rate craziness. That began during the loan application so it has been beyond stressful and we have both questioned whether or not we are doing the right thing. The main thing keeping us going though is that we are thinking very very long term. We are hoping to get through this without having to sell our previous home just yet. 

In order to get the loan application approved we had to close down all our credit cards but one, and there was about $1700 that had to be repaid. Now DH only has a card but I am an additional card holder. I tried applying for a card after the property settled but got declined as my part time earnings are too low so transferred some money into our old EFTPOS account and I am using that in place of my own credit card. There were times when he had barely any credit on his card and I wanted to get fuel and would scramble to get the money together, so my own EFTPOS card works for this purpose. I have a transfer in place to add $10 per week, as it stands there is $186 in this account. 

Our previous home got so much work done on it before it rented! The heater died 3 weeks before we moved and so we put a new unit costing $2200 on it on DH’s credit card (this is why he had barely any room on his), this is being repaid over 10 months, I have set up monthly transfers back to the credit card from the rental account on the 20th of each month. 

Initially I thought to bring everything in the house to working order we would need new blinds in 2 rooms, and new taps in the bathroom, new toilet seats on both toilets, and the carpets steam cleaned. It ended up being new blinds in 2 rooms, new taps in both bathrooms and the laundry, 2 new toilets, a new rangehood, plasterwork fixed in two rooms, a door repair, repainting a window sill in the laundry, a new ducted heating unit, carpet cleaning and a move out clean done (we ran out of time so DH got his cleaner from work to do it with her cleaning crew). As well as this we had to get all the electrical items and smoke alarms checked, and today are getting the gas items checked. Everything we have done is claimable on tax as it is getting the property ready to rent out. 

By the time the works were done our old house looked lovely and the investment paid off well because they only had to two inspections. 30 groups came through, 17 applied. We purposely did not ask for a super high rental amount even though we could get it so this made our property quite competitive in the market! We got a great application from a family who offered $20 more per week and six months rent upfront. The agent said they have great references so we accepted them as tenants, and they move in Monday! 

Having the property rent so quickly has taken a big load off our minds as it has eased the money stress. However the loans are going up rapidly so now that we have moved and settled in we have to focus on our finances and work out what we need to do to get by. Cost of living is sky high so we need to work out what needs to be cut/reduced and I will likely need to earn a bit more money. 

I did say I would find a full time job if needed but first I want to try really pushing my bookkeeping business.  I now work every morning at my job and my job is secure, the people are lovely. I did try to gauge whether I could get full time work there but they are not super keen as the job doesn’t really need to be full time and not only that, I’m not super keen to be full time there as it would be really long days with an hour drive each way. It would be great to work from home in the afternoons so I will be focusing on that option. 

If you have all stayed with me so far, thank you for reading! Wish me luck in navigating through this next phase of my life!