Our mortgage was so high we had to move into our holiday home in Portugal
Tanya Love and her partner never thought they would be forced into relocating their whole family abroad
When the monthly mortgage bill for Tanya Love’s London flat quadrupled in a matter of months, she was forced to make a difficult decision. Here, she tells Hannah Fearn how her family have moved to a rural cottage in Portugal near Lake Alqueva and rented out their London home on Airbnb just to be able to keep up with repayments.
While we were on holiday visiting family, my partner and I found a small home in need of renovation in a remote part of the Alentejo region of Portugal. We had been looking for a holiday place and we thought it would be a perfect background project.
It’s a beautiful and relatively unknown area inland, close to the Spanish border, and near where my partner’s dad lives. It’s a small two-bedroom single-storey house and it needs a lot of work, so it was inexpensive at just
€60,000 (£51,000). We bought it together with a small mortgage from a local bank, completing on it late last year. We planned to renovate the garden room so that it has a third bedroom and use it as a holiday home.
Two years later, we and our two-year-old son are living there full-time while renting out our flat through Airbnb – just to be able to keep paying our London mortgage. We never looked for a house in Portugal imagining we would be moving here, but we’ve been forced to respond to our circumstances.
I bought a two-bedroom flat in Islington, north London, in 2008 before the financial crash. It was an interest-only mortgage and I had bought it with the plan to do it up and sell it on.When I met my partner six years ago, he moved in with me and then we had a child. It became our family home.
But in 2022 everything changed. After interest rates rocketed, our mortgage repayments went up from £430 a month to £2,079. I always knew at some point interest rates would do this, but for them to go up so much and so suddenly was a shock. It was really bad timing, having a toddler – we could not afford childcare and the mortgage.
We are both self-employed – I am a yoga teacher and my partner is a sculptor – so our income fluctuates.
We were really starting to feel that, every time you walk out of the door in London, all you think about is money. Every time you’re in the supermarket, you’re looking at the special offers. I’ve never been well off, but I’ve never before had that feeling – of being unable to do anything because you can’t afford it.
I had my son late – I’m 46 now – and it’s difficult to feel the most financially unstable I’ve ever felt. It really hangs on your shoulders and puts a toll on our relationship. It’s as if you’re throwing a stress ball between the two of you.
We didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to sell our flat because it is my home. I’ve lived there for a long time and it’s around the corner from my mum. But when we looked at how much cheaper childcare was in Portugal, we started to think about going there. Once the purchase was complete late last year, we decided we had no choice. In January, we moved to Portugal and started renting the flat out through Airbnb.
It’s definitely given us a financial break. It’s nice to have that feeling again that you can go out and have a glass of wine and maybe something to eat without thinking about it. It just lifts the weight of worrying about your finances.
The childcare situation is so different here. In a few months, our son will be able to go to the kindergarten around the corner, a four-minute walk, for the price of €1 (86p) per day.
So far we have settled in well. It’s no bigger than our London home and there is a lot of dust and tradesmen around at the moment as we’re doing it up, but the climate is great and the lifestyle is relaxing. Our toddler sleeps in the afternoon and then can stay up late when the town comes to life in the evening.
People here are thrilled, rather than annoyed, when you arrive with a small child. We have made friends; there are a few other international folk nearby, so we have a little social scene.
It’s difficult for us to make any long-term plans. We are both freelance and so we will need to establish ourselves out here if we want to stay. When my son starts nursery and I have more time, I want to go back to working more, doing yoga classes online, and see how viable that is.
There are restrictions to our plan. In London you can only offer a property on Airbnb for 90 days a year unless you agree to a single long stay. However, my mum has not been terribly well so I’ve had to come back a few times, so it works for us as we can have a window when there’s nobody in our flat.
If we decide to stay in Portugal, we’ll have to consider a long-term let, which means we won’t be able to do that any more. Plus my flat is on for £210 a night on a short let and nobody is going to spend that for a three-month booking.
My mortgage on the London flat is a 25-year interest-only arrangement, which doesn’t touch the capital owed so, in around a decade, I will have to find the money to pay off the original lump sum borrowed to purchase the property. At that point, I suppose we will have to sell. I’m not in a terrible position and I realise that compared to many people we are very lucky.
Meantime, we are preparing for summer in Portugal. It will be scorching, but we’ll be moving a fan around from room to room and coming inside in the middle of the day. We don’t have air conditioning but we’re close to the lake. We can go to cool off at the beach, after a hot day working on the house.