{"id":104,"date":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/?p=104"},"modified":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","slug":"a-helping-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/2020\/10\/01\/a-helping-hand\/","title":{"rendered":"A Helping Hand"},"content":{"rendered":"It was already a four-bedroom house when I went in, and he\u2019d done a bit of a Bob the Builder<br \/>renovation. I had to redo some of the things, but I wasn\u2019t really bothered because I\u2019d got it<br \/>\u00a310,000 cheaper than I was originally happy with, and it was now in a better condition.<br \/>By this point, I was thinking, \u201cBloody hell, I\u2019m now earning way more than my salary.\u201d I\u2019d<br \/>managed to give myself over 150% pay raise. Once the renovations were done, and the tenants<br \/>were in, it was case of just dealing with issues as and when they came. Having four properties in<br \/>very close vicinity to each other, consumed about 40 to 60 hours a week, every single week, just<br \/>like a job does. It was bringing in more money than I was earning from my full-time job.<br \/>Nonetheless, it was handy being full-time employed when it came to mortgage applications.<br \/>Around the same time as I bought this house, one of my really good friends said, \u201cMy friend<br \/>Rachael\u2019s got a problem. She\u2019s living with her ex-partner, needs to move out, and wants some<br \/>property advice. Can you have a chat with her, to see what her options are? You seem to know a<br \/>lot about property.\u201d I wouldn\u2019t have called myself an expert at that point, but I thought if I could<br \/>impart some knowledge, that would be better than nothing. As it turned out, our meeting ended<br \/>up being our first date, and ever since then, seven years ago, we\u2019ve been inseparable.<br \/>My life completely changed at that moment. I had been doing 100 odd hours a week, trying to be<br \/>a Jack of all trades and I just didn\u2019t have any time. When I met Rachael, I fell head over heels in<br \/>love. When we first started going out, I never let on to her how busy I was. I was just acting like<br \/>everything was nice and easy going, and I could take everything in my stride, but beneath the<br \/>surface, I was working at warp-speed to try and make sure that everything was done. I was<br \/>working really late into the night at full speed, with multiple computers going at the same time<br \/>doing different things. Just literally, any minute of time that I could claw back, I had to. At the<br \/>time, Rachael was still living with her ex-partner, so we were both very keen to get her out of<br \/>that situation. So I helped her get a property,<br \/>Rachael moved into a property, everything was happy days \u2013 and then I got a phone call from<br \/>my dad. He said, \u201cI\u2019m back in England, can you come tomorrow morning and have a chat?\u201d My<br \/>dad\u2019s normally quite a chipper, upbeat kind of guy, but he sounded a bit scared or nervous. I<br \/>couldn\u2019t quite work it out.<br \/>The next day, was a really cold April morning, and as I walked down the stairs to their front<br \/>door, this really weird shiver came over me. After an hour or so of beating around the bush, my<br \/>dad said to me, \u201cI\u2019ve just received my annuity statement from my pension company and it\u2019s<br \/>pretty grim reading. I\u2019ve been paying in for years and years and years, and I\u2019m only six years<br \/>away from retiring. I\u2019m looking at this, and there\u2019s absolutely no way I can afford to live on the<br \/>annuity. I can\u2019t even afford to pay for our food and all the basic house bills, let alone a mortgage,<br \/>running cars, having any holidays, nothing. I\u2019m really scared.\u201d It was hideous. My dad has<br \/>always been my hero. He\u2019d worked so hard all his life and made sure that if I ever needed<br \/>anything he\u2019d always pay for it. I was concerned about getting into a load of debt to go to<br \/><br \/>university, but he was really keen for me to go so he kindly paid. All the time I was at university,<br \/>that was all money that was coming out what he\u2019d saved up. I felt really bad because my dad was<br \/>working a lot of hours and doing a shit-load of travelling, and at the end of the month, he had<br \/>more out-goings than he had incomings. Now, my dad was in such a sticky financial position that<br \/>my parents were thinking about selling the house and reconsidering what they would do with<br \/>their life. That really upset me.<br \/>My dad said, \u201cI\u2019ve seen what you\u2019re doing with houses, I was wondering if there\u2019s any way we<br \/>could work together?\u201d I thought, \u201cWow, I\u2019m really flattered, but my God, what a scary<br \/>responsibility. I need to sort it out because otherwise they going to have a really bad quality of<br \/>life.\u201d I just felt really bad.<br \/>I had been bleeding my money dry every single time I\u2019d been buying my houses, borrowing the<br \/>money from here and then saving up a bit and then putting it with some other borrowed money. I<br \/>was wondering how on earth we would do this.<br \/>We worked out a plan and bought a house together, then converted it into an HMO. I thought,<br \/>\u201cHang on, I\u2019m going to have to share this money with my parents because we\u2019ve agreed a 50\/50<br \/>split. I don\u2019t want to do all of this work to only get \u00a3100 a month each. So let\u2019s put in some more<br \/>people.\u201d By the end of it, we had a six-bedroom house.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was already a four-bedroom house when I went in, and he\u2019d done a bit of a Bob the Builderrenovation. I had to redo some of the things, but I wasn\u2019t really bothered because I\u2019d got it\u00a310,000 cheaper than I was originally happy with, and it was now in a better condition.By this point, I&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}