Straight answers about running, keeping and selling a home: what things cost, what the paperwork means and what to do before it becomes a problem.
The average first-time buyer deposit is quoted at around £61,000. The number most first-time buyers actually need is a fraction of that once the reliefs, bonuses and low-deposit products are counted properly. We have written the guide that does the counting and it is free.
Almost every expensive repair in a home starts out as a cheap one that nobody got round to. This is the plain version: what needs doing around a UK home, how often, season by season and the handful of checks that are a legal duty rather than good practice.
Planning permission and building regulations are two separate systems asking two different questions. A job can need one, both or neither. This is how to tell them apart, which one produces a certificate and why a buyer will ask you for it years later.
There are only four things on the list and yet almost every penalty a landlord picks up comes from one of them being out of date rather than missing. This is what each record covers, how long it lasts and who is entitled to a copy.
A receipt proves you paid somebody. It does not prove the work met building regulations, that the guarantee is worth anything, or that the wall you removed was supposed to come out. This is what actually counts as evidence and what to capture while the work is happening.
If you have more bedrooms than people, you are probably paying for water you do not use. This is how unmetered bills are worked out, the simple test for whether a meter would save you money and the safety net that lets you switch back if it does not.
Overpaying a mortgage is one of the few financial decisions where the arithmetic is genuinely simple and almost nobody does the arithmetic. This is how overpayments work, what your lender does with the money and the handful of questions worth answering before you send any.
A mortgage valuation is not a survey and the three survey levels are not simply cheap, medium and expensive. This is what each one actually looks at, what none of them look at and how to pick the right one for the house in front of you.
Council tax bands in England and Scotland are still based on what a property was worth in 1991, which means a good number of them were wrong from the start and have stayed wrong ever since. Here is how to check yours, how to challenge it properly and why the discounts are often the better place to look first.
