The true cost of buying your dream home can be amazing
If people realised how much it costs to move house over a lifetime, we might just start looking for a real home sooner rather than later.
The story of Alfonso De Marco is enough to strike fear into the heart of hard-pressed estate agents. Mr De Marco, a 107-year-old retired ice cream parlour owner, has lived in Britain since 1909. And in that time how much has he paid in fees to estate agents or letting agents while moving home? Precisely zero. He has just celebrated 100 years at the same “I love it here, it is my home,” he told reporters last week. “I could have moved somewhere else but I have never wanted to.” Just imagine if we all took his attitude, we wouldn’t spend precious time thumbing through the pages of the Tenerife Property Guide in search of our dream home.
No wonder Mr De Marco has lived to be 107. Just think what he has missed out on over the years. He hasn’t had to suffer that coronary-inducing dash to complete a purchase before the gazumpers arrive. He hasn’t suffered disappointment when a property that seemed a good deal turns out to have just gone He hasn’t had the millstone of a mortgage, nor experienced negative equity.
Think of the money we would save if we followed Mr De Marco’s example. Until the property bubble burst and slowed us down, we were, as a nation, in the habit of moving home approximately every seven years and buying that second home in Tenerife as well. In other words, we buy and sell around seven houses during our adult lives. We will have spent around €85,000 in property tax alone in our lifetimes.
Assuming we pay estate agents to sell our homes we will spend a further amount in estate agents’ fees. Then there might be the cost of solicitors’ fees - and the cost of removal vans, reprinting our personalised stationery and so on - perhaps another €1000 per move. Then there is the cost of redecorating each property to remove the previous owners’ taste. That is going to cost at least €10,000 per property on average.
All in all, that adds up to around €215,000 spent moving home in our lifetimes - which is more than the average 65 year-old has in a pension fund. Just think of all those extra holidays in retirement in Tenerife had we not blown our earnings moving house so much or how much bigger our dream home in the sun might have been!
As far as I am concerned there is only one way to go house hunting: imagine, like Mr De Marco, that you will still be there in 100 years. If the thought of being stuck in Stoke for the next century is abhorrent, forget it: don’t buy that dream house until you have found a property in which you really would be satisfied to live until you are carted away in a box. Then move there and stay there. While your friends waste their lives upsizing and then downsizing, you can stay the same size - and enjoy yourself and the weather in Tenerife.
