Hey everyone, my partner and I are separating and I’m sanity-checking our decision to sell our house and rent separately, to see if this feels like the right call:
- We live in London and have an 18-month-old. Child arrangement will be 50/50.
- We bought this 3-bed terraced house last year for £660k.
- The mortgage is £2.7k/month on a 2-year fixed at 4.9%. We could remortgage at the end of 2026 and potentially reduce this to £2.2k per month, depending on rates.
- We’d likely each rent a 1/2 bed flat in the same area at around £1.7k per month.
- Based on the expected sale price (we’re starting to list with an estate agent), selling costs and what we’ve already spent on the house, we may break even, which we recognise is relatively fortunate.
- We’re financially stable: both earn above-average incomes, have savings, and don’t need to sell for short-term cash reasons.
We considered renting out the house and both moving out, but with only 20% of mortgage interest deductible plus the hassle of being landlords, it doesn’t feel viable.
We also considered one of us staying while the other moves out, but running costs would be higher and with a 50/50 childcare split, the house wouldn’t function as a full-time family home anyway.
It feels like we might be missing something. This isn’t an ideal situation (we’re mainly trying to mitigate a bad one) so I’d really appreciate other perspectives or things we should factor in. We haven’t shared this publicly, so it’s hard to run it past people we know.
P.S. Throwaway account, as I’m not sure who follows my main one.