Hi there,
We're moving to a paradise island for… a while (could be a year or could be forever). The Mrs will be working but I don’t have a job lined up and it might be hard for me to find one. We will be staying at her Grandma’s place for the first year, in exchange for fixing up the place, or until we find another accommodation.
We own 2 properties and both are located in the Bayside area of Melbourne.
Property 1: “Happy House”
It is a 2 bedroom + study house. We call it the "Happy House". We bought it soon after we got married, almost 12 years ago. We furnished it with donated and second-hand furniture and slept on a mattress on the floor for a very long time. We had so little and yet were so happy and in love. Every single room in that house is filled with scintillating memories of joy and laughter; even the driveway, where my son was too eager to be born to wait until we reached the hospital.
By the time we moved out, there was 7 of us ( 2 adults, 2 kids , an Ewok, a Darthie and a Goldfish) and we were planning on having more kids.
Currently, my best friend lives there and is looking after our cat, Darthie M, who has chosen to stay in Melbourne. Darthie is too old and cranky to ever thrive in Paradise Island (PI). My best friend has a bad credit rating ( he had several addictions, including gambling) and a shocking rental history( he has a pattern of dating psycho women , then cheating on them and getting his placed thrashed by said psycho women when they find out he's been cheating on them.)
We have received an unsolicited offer on the property and so has the neighbour. We believe that the investor is planning to demolish both properties and build apartments or a couple of townhouses on the 2 lots.If we do sell, as advised by our financial adviser, we are concerned that my best friend might not be able to find a decent place to move to.
Property 2: “ Thornfield Hall”
I can't remember why we bought it. At the time, we were told that it was too good an investment to pass on ( which it has been, considering how much it is worth now) but none of us really liked it that much. Maybe we thought we would grow into it or maybe we were just tired of house-hunting. We never grew into it: it is the perfect house for the perfect family. But we are not the perfect family: we are too loud and messy and enthusiastic and exuberant and accident-prone and incontinent…at least the cat is, to have ever been happy there. There were also no more babies, as we had planned and hoped for. The house is just too big, with too many empty rooms.
Not too long after we moved in, a very deplorable 'incident' occurred: someone slit their wrists in our master bedroom's bathtub. Our son found him while the rest of us were watching tv downstairs.He survived but we couldn't move back into that house. We lived in a motel until a 'colleague' offered to house-swap.
The ‘colleague’ has made us what we believe to be a fair offer. If we sell Thorfield Hall, as we call it, we could pay off our mortgage and still have more than enough money to buy a property ( or 2) in PI and not have to worry about money or finding a job for a very , very long time.
Our financial adviser says it is too good of an investment to ever sell.
What would you do if you were in our shoes?
TL;DR : Our financial adviser has advised that we should sell property 1, to which we are very emotionally attached and always refer to as the “Happy Place”. My best friend currently lives there and it would be very hard for him to find another suitable rental because of his credit, rental and past conquests history.
On the other hand, we’ve been advised to rent out property #2 and this will be our back-up plan if we ever decide to move back to Oz. We are still paying the mortgage on property #2 and have received a very fair offer for it. It is also highly unlikely that the children would ever want to live in that place again following a traumatic event that happened there.
What would you do if you were in our shoes?
Even the TL:DR was TL:DR