Thinking of moving : selling up and moving the family off to the country.

S

stano

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Hi, we are due to come into some cash in the next year and are now thinking of selling up and moving the family off to the country. My husbands English so we may move to England, don't know yet.
Anyway we have the country dream, a few fields, our own veg, wind turbine in the garden.... Anyone done this??? Are we mad??? Does it work???
 
Ive moved this post from the car related forum to the miscellaneous non financial questions forum.

Could you be a bit more specific with your question?

aj
 
As a longtime resident of England, I would think long and hard before moving over here. Housing very expensive; food the same for good quality.
 
BillK said:
As a longtime resident of England, I would think long and hard before moving over here. Housing very expensive; food the same for good quality.
Click to expand...

Have you been to Ireland lately? The cost of housing here is over the top. I went to England last year and couldn't believe how much we pay for food in comparison. I'm happy to stay here but I think my husband want's to go home...
Not sure what to do.

Sorry if I put this on a car thread, new to all this........!
 
I was also a UK resident and I can tell you by the time you have paid out Council tax, water rates etc. you will be better off here, and I should know having spent over 35 years there.It's not just the cost either that you have to take into consideration, it's the quality of life, people have to put up with all sorts of aggro, including road rage, no one has any patience, in banks or other government offices, and if you dont pay bills within ten days you get threatened with bailiff's etc.etc. I have been here five years and it would be a long time before the ESB or Telecom would threaten you over a bill. I know people might not believe this but it is true. So my advice to anyone thinking of crossing the pond is stay where you are.
 

Maybe that is one of the reasons why we pay so much in Ireland for our electricity and phone calls ? Maybe that "tomorrow will do, shure its all right " attitude is why it often takes months to get paid by Irish companies too. Maybe the attitude trickles down to sometimes waiting so long to get things done / tradespeople to turn up on time etc.
 

I honestly don't think Ireland is like that anymore, we have most of the same problems as the UK,as for property prices, ireland would be more expensive (maybe London being the exception)
Also stamp duty on second hand homes would probably be more than council tax.

And don't get me started on Car prices, Road Tax.!!
 
We most certainly do not have the problems here that they have in the UK. I can say that quite categorically.The general quality of life here is far superior and people have a lot more time for one another.Maybe other people have opinions on this.I could never figure out why people claim that it is so expensive to live here when I have found the exact opposite to be true. Food and clothes are far cheaper, the food is fresher and the clothes better quality.Bills are cheaper and there are less of them.

You can live here for a lot less money than it takes to live in the part of the UK where I was, had I known this before, I would have been here long ago. ( course it all depends on lifestyle as well )
 
Hi Stano,

Yes I have been in Ireland recently and spent 6 weeks over there last year looking for a house.The only reason that we are not living there now is that my daughter-in-law produced our first grandchild, as a result of which my wife refused point blank to move.

The cost of our modest 3 bed detached in a small town inthe English Midlands is currently about £250K.

Council tax costs me £1300 per year, for which I get my bin emptied once a fortnight.
Water rates cost me £650 per year.
Gas & electricity cost me £90 per month or £1080 per year.

The quality of the food over here, unless you pay megabucks is far inferior to that which you get over there.

I should also point out that if you buy a house over here you will pay both stamp duty and council tax, assuming that the house you buy falls into the stamp duty bracket - currently about £250K.
 
Ok, just for comparison:


I live in Cork, I live in a 4 bedroom dormer bungalow which I would consider medium in size and I’m located about 10 miles from the city.
I paid 550,000euro for it last year.
Stamp Duty was 40,000 Euro on top of that price
2 to 3 central heating oil fills a year at 700euro each - 2100 a year
ESB bill of 130-150 Euro every 2 months - 780-900 a year
Bin charge 380 a year
eircom about 40euro a month 480euro a year

Weekly supermarket shopping could be 150-200 a week

If I decide to eat out, for 2 adults, 1 child in an average restaurant could be
70euro in a good restaurant 100-150 Euro.

I have a 4 year old BMW which cost me 24000euro (UK equiv is about 10,000£)

I pay 538euro road tax (UK is 165£ I think)
Petrol is cheaper in Ireland but only just. last time I looked it was 1.06cent/L

Ireland is a beautiful place, but it also has nasty places like some suburbs of Cork/Dublin/Limerick city which I won't mention but have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons.

I’ve also been to Wales about a month ago and found it to be just as beautiful as Ireland with better roads! Same can be said for some parts of Scotland and England.

At the end of the day it's your decision Stano,but just thought I tell you how much it cost me to live in Ireland.
 
Our front garden is a rectangle of about 40 feet X 50 feet with the rear garden about the 10 feet deeper.
 
I do live in Cork at the moment, but we may as well live outside the city as we have young children and cant afford to go out really with the cost of taxi and babysitters. So we thought lets go some place else.
I'm not sure about England only for the fact that it would be harder to see my family and the kids their cousins.
We live in a doggy enough part of Cork, but it's all we could afford to buy, so I'm well aware of the cost of living here.

Still there has to be more to consider than that, my husbands English and I think that it would be easer to live as an Irish person in England than the other way around and I'm sorry about that.

Oh anyway it will be awhile before we have to make the decision.
 
stano said:
Anyway we have the country dream, a few fields, our own veg, wind turbine in the garden.... Anyone done this? Are we mad? Does it work?
Click to expand...

Hi Stano,

Im interested in your original question regarding "The Good Life" (be it in rural England, rural Ireland or where ever).

aj
 
Hi ajapale, thank you for moving my first thread.

I don't know if it's all going to work out, but I grew up on a farm and as a child had more freedom than my kids do. I'm sick of traffic and just running here there and everywhere.
I know on the other hand that the kids have access to all sorts of different stuff while we live in the city.

We will have to get a new heating system, the cost of gas is a joke. If we could supply some of our own electricity and maybe food then shouldn't we?

My husband and I are young enough to be up to the challenge, anyway isn't it boaring to lessen to people who are unhappy in their life just rant on, and you know that they won't do anything about it as it's a gamble, it may not work out.
So there I think we are going to go for it.
Thankyou! You have helped me make up my mind!
 
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