Deposit drama
I am now waiting for the county court to send out acknowledgment letters etc regarding my court claim. I’m sure I will hear from my ex-scumlord very soon.
Property purchase
My offer of £450,000 for a 2 bedroom new-build property was accepted on 1st March 2022. I spent the next month or so sorting out the help-to-buy equity loan – my application was rejected three times as the address on it kept being incorrect or was alleged to be incorrect. That’s all sorted now.
So, it took me a month until my help-to-buy equity loan application was accepted. I received my “authority to proceed” today. This basically means that the government bureaucrats are happy to buy 40% of my future home and I can now proceed to apply for a mortgage to buy my own 60%.
My solicitor even confirmed that he has received draft contracts from the vendor’s solicitor. Things finally look like they are progressing.
Salary review and bonus
I received a salary bump of circa 5% and got a bonus of roughly 11.5% of my old basic salary. I’m quite pleased with this.
Tax year end
I’ve sold my GIA to cash as it’s roughly £30,000. I will use £20,000 to fund my ISA/LISA on the 6/4/2022 and the majority of the remainder as a one-off personal pension contribution on 5/4/2022 to avoid paying higher rate income tax.
I didn’t need to sell all of the GIA for the above money shuffles… but I figured I’d want to realise as much capital gains as possible. However, I still ended up with a small capital loss for 2021/22.
After the ISA/LISA/SIPP funding from the GIA, I expect circa £1,300 remaining, which I will invest in an alternative fund to the one the circa £30,000 proceeds came from (due to the 30 day CGT pooling rules).
Counting my beans
March was a positive month for my portfolio but I’m still in a drawdown.
My net worth as of 31/03/2022 has increased to £275,830 – it’s an increase of £16,730 or 6.5% from the end of February 2022.
The above results are after I made a £474 pension top-up (deducted from salary + employer contribution) and added £5,350 to my cash pile (I need to pay legal fees and stamp duty on my property soon – i.e. circa £10,000 in total in about 2 months’ time). Most of the cash is from my bonus but I also decided to leave my normal monthly investment contribution in cash.