Equity release debt is growing – can I apply for mortgage holiday?

Reader thwarted by lockdown from selling mother’s home to pay for her care home costs

Q My mother took out a lifetime mortgage for equity release in 2011. The amount borrowed was nearly £100,000 (about half the value of her home at that time) at a rate of interest of 7.54%. Following a stroke, she moved into a nursing home in December 2019 so I am now in the process of selling her house to fund the care home fees.

By lockdown in March, I had a buyer in place but activity has been frozen for the last three months. Meanwhile the debt repayable to the equity release firm is apparently increasing at £230 a week, which would reduce the equity available at the end of the lockdown period by over £3,000.

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Chelsea flower show opens online amid lockdown gardening boom

Event comes as experts say green spaces are important for health and mental wellbeing

As an online version of the Chelsea flower show kicks off, horticultural experts are highlighting the mental health benefits of green spaces, with evidence showing people are appreciating their gardens more than ever during lockdown.

The annual show had been due to welcome royals, celebrities and members of the public from Monday, until the coronavirus pandemic forced the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) to cancel the physical event.

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Chelsea flower show opens online amid lockdown gardening boom

Event comes as experts say green spaces are important for health and mental wellbeing

As an online version of the Chelsea flower show kicks off, horticultural experts are highlighting the mental health benefits of green spaces, with evidence showing people are appreciating their gardens more than ever during lockdown.

The annual show had been due to welcome royals, celebrities and members of the public from Monday, until the coronavirus pandemic forced the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) to cancel the physical event.

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A guide to shared ownership Nottingham Estate Agents

It might not seem the ideal way of getting on the property ladder but for more and more young people, it is the only way to make the move. Getting a foot on the property ladder has become increasingly difficult for first time buyers and as a result, shared ownership is becoming more and more […]

The post A guide to shared ownership appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.

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Country diary: these trees have become part of the family

Stamford, Lincolnshire: We share our garden with this elderly couple and I breathe a sigh of relief when they burst into leaf

I know these two well. There they stand, side by side, rain or shine – stoic through the seasons, resolutely inseparable. We share a garden and, as I would any elderly couple, I check on them, watch them for change – and trouble myself by imagining what life would be like if we lost them.

Trees do that when you have them close. They become a part of your family. Beneath the horse chestnut, mine have camped, collected conkers, made leaf piles tall enough to disappear into. We’ve hugged it, climbed it, studied it, sometimes worriedly. I breathe a sigh of relief when the horse chestnut bursts into leaf every March, afflicted as it is with a leaf-mining moth – nothing more serious, not yet – that turns its leaves brown earlier every year.

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Country diary: these trees have become part of the family

Stamford, Lincolnshire: We share our garden with this elderly couple and I breathe a sigh of relief when they burst into leaf

I know these two well. There they stand, side by side, rain or shine – stoic through the seasons, resolutely inseparable. We share a garden and, as I would any elderly couple, I check on them, watch them for change – and trouble myself by imagining what life would be like if we lost them.

Trees do that when you have them close. They become a part of your family. Beneath the horse chestnut, mine have camped, collected conkers, made leaf piles tall enough to disappear into. We’ve hugged it, climbed it, studied it, sometimes worriedly. I breathe a sigh of relief when the horse chestnut bursts into leaf every March, afflicted as it is with a leaf-mining moth – nothing more serious, not yet – that turns its leaves brown earlier every year.

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Ahead of the curve: an eco dome by the sea

An architect’s striking home in a dome on the New Zealand coast is as visually interesting as it is groundbreaking

There is an unusual sight to be found in the small hamlet of Peka Peka, on the windswept west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. At first, it looks like a series of modest hillocks, but on closer inspection some of them have windows and small white towers rise above the landscape like periscopes.

Friedrich (“Fritz”) and Helen Eisenhofer’s idiosyncratic dwelling lies beneath the grass of these knolls; it is a prototype domestic biodome for what Fritz, a modernist architect who was trained at the Kunstakademie in Vienna, has called the Eco Home. Fritz travelled from Austria to the Pacific in 1953 to begin a career there that now spans more than half a century.

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