Your New House Comes With Everything, Except Everything You Need!

I've been thinking, and I've come to the conclusion that no doubt everyone else has: No matter how rich I was, I wouldn't buy a private jet. I mean, despite how cool it would be to say "darling, shall we take the Learjet to San Tropez tonight", it would be such an enormous hassle to look after the stupid thing. First, you need to hire a pilot, because you want to make full use of the expensive luxury seating option in the middle bit that you had to pick. You need to hire glamorous assistants, because no self respecting squillionaire gets his own drinks. You'd need to organise fuelling, and it might surprise you to find that you can't land in the nearest Shell, you have to get a whopping great tanker down before you go anywhere remotely hot or bikini-clad. You then need to maintain it, which requires about eleventeen weeks of fixing it for every seven feet it flies, you then have to insure it and make sure it's safe. And where does it live when it's not flying?

Or, I could just hire one when I need it. Then, I could spend more time being rich.

I will acknowledge that I'm guilty of the art of not always taking into consideration the cost of things before the pound signs come up in my eyes and I launch my credit card at someone, but I do try to. I still haven't got my much coveted iPhone, mostly because I still can't justify spending £35 a month before I even think of the cost of the phone. However I did buy a Land Rover Discovery. Now, that car had a bit of a drinking problem, but I wasn't driving far and this wasn't a massive problem. However it wasn't until afterwards that it occurred to me that if anything important broke, then I'd be massively unstuck. I thought parts would be a bit pricey, but not that much! A new gearbox would have been £3,000! Luckily, this behemoth of a car was bought by someone in February this year who had no idea what he was doing before things started going pop and the car retired. This was a Land Rover as well, so the fact that nothing actually broke/fell off/disintegrated in three years makes me officially the luckiest person to have ever lived.

Now, these are pretty easy to work out. I know what I need to pay for on a car, and I can look up what it will cost. I know, for example, that anyone bored of the front bumper on their Lamborghini Murcielago better have about ten grand to one side. I also know that anyone wanting to change the tyres their Perodua Kelisa needs to have an "assessment" to establish why they bought such a horrendous car in the first place. However it's when you do something for the first time, that you realise how expensive things can get. Right now, I am in the process with Mrs Max of buying a house. It's lovely, and it's also a brand new house. Now, anyone who has looked into buying a new house will know that there's lots of deals they can get you, they're always open to knocking so much off the price to get you to autograph their paperwork, but they don't always tell you that you'll need to keep this "saved" money to one side to pay for literally everything. For example, I've never moved into a new house and had to arrange for new carpets, because there's wood and cement where they should be. Then we move on to the garden, which in the show-house is all lovely and turfed and agreeable. Should I look at that and conclude that I wish to imitate such lawned pleasantry, it would cost a total of £275 extra! Really! Nearly £300 for some grass?

So now, in the months coming up as they build the place, I've got the mind-numbing joy of choosing carpet swatches from Carpet Right, deciding which lino will go with the kitchen cabinets, and whether having gnomes in the garden will mark us out as the sort of people that parents warn their kids about. Therefore I've come to the conclusion that new houses are far more hassle than the savings they throw at you. I even had to pay for a search by the solicitor! The place isn't even shaped like a house yet, what did he search? Therefore any future house-buying shenanigans will be done via an estate agent and not a show-home.

Or better yet, I'm just going to spend the next four or so months until it's built renting somewhere. That way, like the Learjet, I can enjoy the property without worrying about forking out when the toilet breaks, badgers set up home in the roof, or the value of the house dropping so low that a broken window makes it a write-off. I can do what you should do with such things: Enjoy them!

Tweet