‘We bought two holiday homes with the equity of our house’

Ella (43), married to Marcel, mother of Lize (5) and the twins Olivier and Koen (3).

“When I returned to work at a bank after my maternity leave from the twins, I sat in the car crying in the morning. The boys didn’t sleep well and didn’t drink well and yet I left them in the nursery. I myself was up after months of broken nights and I no longer liked my busy job before my leave. Three children at the daycare was a huge bite out of my salary and that added to all that stress – what was I doing it for?

But yes, stopping and giving up what I had built up, I couldn’t just do that. Moreover, we simply needed my income to pay the mortgage, which was after all taken out on two incomes. All we had was equity on our house, but what good is that if you don’t sell? We didn’t want to move.

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Holiday homes

Until Marcel came up with an idea. Could we not withdraw the equity from the mortgage and thus achieve a return? I do work at a bank, but in the fraud department, not at mortgages. So I had no idea how this would work, but it sounded appealing.

We sat down with an advisor and it turned out to be surprisingly easy. We were able to take out most of the almost three thousand dollars that our house was worth more than the mortgage we had, subject to certain conditions. We would then finance our home to its current market value and include the excess equity portion thereof, at the prevailing mortgage interest rate. Our house was worth seven hundred thousand, according to the valuation report, our mortgage was 410,000 euros. Left over: 290,000 euros. The amount was enough to invest in, for example, an extra house for rent.

“What good is that surplus value on our house, we thought.”

Except that those houses are currently too expensive for us. That is why we decided to focus on the holiday homes. You sometimes see such offers: investing in a house in a park, and getting a return of six percent or more. That always seemed a bit too tempting promise to me, but when I went to request information anyway, it turned out to be a large kernel of truth. Although the return in our case would only be high if we did not sit in the house in the high season, but it was intended as an investment, so we did not find that a problem.

Coming home with a smile

Within a year of our first meeting with the advisor, we signed the deed of purchase for our holiday home in a park in the Veluwe; 150,000 euros, and we could pay that in no time. We initially outsourced the rental to an agency. Soon our cottage was almost fully booked from April to September. That is going well, we thought, and we bought a house with the remaining part of the equity plus some savings.

I was so done with my job that I decided to quit. I soon found another job for fewer hours and less money, but we make up the difference with the proceeds from the rental. To increase this, we also took the management into our own hands.

Now I work on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays and often drive to our cottages on Wednesdays and Saturdays to arrange things and greet new guests. Then I take the children with me, who enjoy themselves in the forest and in the playground and love it there. I always come home with a smile. That almost never happened when I was still working at the bank.”

This article appears in Kek Mama 14-2021.

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