Home improve or move?

Ben and Jenny Warren live in Horsforth in Leeds with their two children, Dylan aged six and Sophie aged two. They’ve lived in their 3-bedroomed semi-detached home since 2007. Having originally planned to stay there for just a few years, they recently had to choose between moving and improving.

Jenny, 38, works as a project manager and Ben, 40, is a multi-site general manager in the bar and restaurant industry. Although they are happy in their current home, they knew if they were going to make the decision to stay put that there were some improvements they’d need to plan.

Jenny explains, “When we bought this house, we imagined that we’d only stay here for a few years, but life moves very quickly and 11 years and two kids later, we’re still here.

Having already remortgaged twice since moving in, we’ve done some work on the property including an extension, but there were still some outstanding ‘big jobs’ such as the fact that the windows needed replacing. So with our existing mortgage deal about to come to an end, we knew we needed to decide whether to take the opportunity to move, or to stay put but invest in making this house suitable for us and our children for the foreseeable future.

We looked around at the properties that were available and went to meet with our mortgage adviser to talk through the options. We found that in order to move up the ladder either in terms of area or property type we were going to have to make a big jump financially.

Ben and I decided that we wanted security and with Brexit on the horizon and our uncertainty about how that might impact on our finances, we thought it made sense to stay where we are and make some improvements to our home.

We talked to our mortgage adviser about increasing our borrowing to see whether we’d be able to do what we wanted. We’d previously been on quite a high fixed rate deal due to the fact that rates have come down so much since we took out the deal so we were really surprised to find that we could take out a five year fixed deal, with some additional borrowing and still keep our monthly repayments in line with our budget.

It was quite a relief to know that we have taken control of our budget for the next five years and have also been able to raise the capital we need for new windows, a new front door, a new porch and a few internal improvements. I really like the peace of mind knowing that this can be our family home for years to come."