Tonight I can't sleep. Joni is happily sleeping next to me but I can't sleep. "How can this be so?" I hear you cry. Well, 2 days ago something rather dramatic happened and thus unrolled the following, highly stressful weekend....
"Sorry to do this to you but I need my house back. Can you move out by the 17th of Feb. Love your landlord"
This was the txt message I revived from my landlord at 2pm on Friday afternoon, or words to that effect. Needless to say my brain went into total meltdown and 'ahhhhhhhhhh' was all I thought for about 12 hours. Luckily Joni is much less of a drama queen than me and he walked me through what our options were, and what should happen next.
The options are pretty simple. A) rent somewhere else, B) buy a house. In truth buying a house has long been a goal of our for this year (ever since The Great Mortgage U-Turn of 2010) but it was really for in 6 months time. You see, we have no deposit. What we have is 2 creditcards, 1 loan & 4 overdrafts. And interestingly one visa will not cover a house deposit! We always planned on taking a loan for a deposit (i mean really, the only people who can afford to save £15k before they are 40 live with their parents and ask yourself, who is really doing the saving in that situation?) but we hadn't quite reached the point where we could apply for a big enough loan yet, which brings me onto the real point of this post (and my sleeplessness)....
Has anyone noticed how ridiculous the current credit system is in the country? I mean really, seriously ridiculous. See we had a meeting with a man from Lloyds yesterday. Very nice man, very helpful, would have lent us £131 thousand pounds for a house in a heartbeat, but £13k for the deposit?!? No way! And I know the mortgage is secured against the house bla bla bla but why not secure the loan against the house too? It's just insane. The idea that I can get one hundred and thirty thousand pounds (seriously, say it out loud like that, its a huge sum of money) but I might not be able to buy because instead of staying home and sponging off mummy & daddy I went out and got a life is just extraordinary.
And before someone spells it out to me, I know its incase the house looses value, to cover fees (not that the grands worth of mortgage fees wouldnt do that) and the banks covering their arse bla bla, we get it. What really annoys me, what really gets to me, is that it is all decided by a practically-arbitrary computer system.
In the last 6 years I have proven I can budget, I can handle money. You can practically watch in my bank statments how I improve with money over the past decade. I the last 18 months Joni & I shown how we know exactly how to live to a tight budget, and in the last 5 months we have paid back over £2000 of debt while living in a rented house. Will anyone take notice of this proven responsibly? Of course not! You can't quantify that and turn it into an algorithm for measuring candidates so it doesn't count. No one cares for your actual situation, they only care about the numbers written down.
Tomorrow we have a meeting with our bank in which we will basically find out if we can get a house. Turns out, thanks to credit scoring, it may all come down to wheather we have a landline or not.
We don't.
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