Do I count as a first-time buyer if I inherit a share of a home abroad?

I’m worried I’ll lose my bonuses in a help-to-buy Isa and/or relief from stamp duty land tax

Q My partner and I are looking to buying our first home in London together so have both been saving in help-to-buy Isa accounts. However, I am soon inheriting soon a share of a property in Finland. I understand that this apparently ruins my chances of benefiting from any first-time buyer advantages here in UK as I am not allowed to own or have owned any other property beforehand, even overseas.

After a lot of research, I still haven’t quite managed to find a confirming answer if it makes any difference what the value or owned percentage of the property to be inherited is. In some cases I have understood that the higher stamp duty charges can be negotiated, but I haven’t quite found any guarantees about this either. In my case I will be inheriting 50% of a property where my share is worth less than £25,000 – I suppose no matter how low in value or how small percentage I’d own, it wouldn’t make a difference? I am mainly asking, as of course for the papers we can put down just 49% as my share, should this make a difference as it has a massive difference in the cost of buying my first home here in UK.

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Housing market: average UK asking price dips £10,000

Larger than usual festive slowdown alarms market with London, east and south-east England worst hit

Asking prices for homes coming on to the market in the UK are nearly £10,000 lower than they were in October, as the property market headed for its worst annual performance in almost a decade.

The average asking price of a UK home dipped by 3.2%, or £9,719, between October and December to £297,527, according to the property website Rightmove, with prices dipping 1.7% and 1.5% in November and December respectively.

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Our lock-and-leave culture: the rise of self-storage and clinging to stuff we hardly use

Moving, downsizing, long-term renovations, deceased estates and divorce are all factors in the relentlessly increasing demand for off-site storage

About once every six weeks I go to my least happy place. It’s a massive warehouse in the industrial back blocks of Port Kembla housing a storage facility called Super Easy Storage. Because it is a no-frills operation, it does not offer 24-hour access like the more upmarket companies do, so I have to call ahead to say I am coming, giving a minimum of three days’ notice so they can arrange to make our plywood crates available, shifting them to ground level from towering stacks that stretch in an endless cubist landscape of anonymous geometry.

The crates (which Super Easy calls modules or pods to make them sound groovier) contain the possessions my mother has brought with her as part of her decision to relocate from the UK after 60 years and live with us. A brutal cull reduced her possessions by two thirds, but she still brought 2,000 cookbooks, as well as a vast trilingual general library, a cumbersome early-model knitting machine she has not used in a decade but cannot bear to part with, extravagant quantities of china, canteens of cutlery, a battery of professional cookware sufficient to equip a small restaurant, enough fabric to open a shop, a collection of vintage luxury-brand handbags, the wardrobe of Marie Antoinette and all her furniture. Many pieces are fragile, obsolete, or of little value, except of the sentimental kind.

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