‘Can I afford to move far away after my divorce?’

Dieuwke (37) is the divorced mother of Mart (9) and Geke (7).

“When I divorced the father of my children a year ago, our intention was to continue living in the same neighborhood. My ex sees the children every other weekend, and that way they could also stay at their trusted school. With pain and effort we managed to find a temporary rental home in our area. Too expensive, and with a bedroom too few. We live in the Randstad, and looking for a permanent home has become a kind of extra job next to my real, full-time job.

The painful reality: I still have years to wait for a house. Only, I don’t have one. The rent of my current home will expire soon. I don’t want to move from temporary accommodation to temporary accommodation. My children need stability. Moving into the marital home and forcing my ex more or less into a nomadic existence is not an option; even with his child support I cannot bear the burden of our house.

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To move house

In the north of the country, renting in the free sector is just as expensive and difficult, but buying a modest house is possible. My children are screaming bloody murder at the thought of leaving home and hearth for a new life, far away from their friends and father. Moreover, it is not what we agreed in our divorce agreement; it states that we must always live close to each other within a radius of ten kilometers. But the current housing market is force majeure. I can’t drag my children to a new, temporary home every year, with all the additional, high costs that entails? Can I make it to the other side of the country to move?”

More episodes of the dilemma? Every Tuesday there is a new story on KekMama.nl. Read the previous dilemmas here.