Amidst the Christmas mania, we managed to exchange on the Dream Home yesterday. Gulp. This makes this an appropriate post to answer hawkipa’s question about how I get my head around stamp duty.
We had to up our offer by a bit to secure the deal. It had become clear the vendor was very motivated by exchanging pre Christmas but it wasn’t clear whether he’d risk taking the £30k (!) lockout non-refundable deposit he was being offered by a rival bidder. In the end I reasoned that the difference in my bid was sufficiently small that I would never forgive myself if we lost the house for this reason, so we coughed up.
But with the purchase now contracted, I thought I’d answer @hawkipa’s question:
“Enjoying reading this as my wife has just found a new ‘forever’ home and the issues are quite similar. How did you get your head around the stamp duty as that is such a big blocker for me right now?”
FIRE v London 