The money Greg paid me for the dozen or so cars I sold
augmented our loan from the bank to the extent that we were okay for money for
about eighteen months, but towards the middle of 1998 we were running short
again.
Liz’s radiation treatment seemed to have worked: certainly
she was showing no signs of having another seizure, so I broached the subject
of us selling the flat and moving into something we could afford to pay cash
for. It would mean no more sitting in bed watching the windsurfers, and we
would miss the daily contact with some of our neighbours in the block, some of
whom had become good friends, but needs must. I wouldn’t miss the chairman of
the block’s management committee. He was a royal pain in the rear. A retired
high-flying businessman, his hobby was making furniture, nice pieces I have to
admit. Each flat had a garage under the building and he had converted his garage into
a workshop and he would insist on sawing and drilling and hammering when Liz
was trying to take a nap, despite being asked time and time again to please cease
and desist.
Liz had no problem with the idea of moving. She had said for
years she would never get attached to bricks and mortar - which was just as
well considering the number of times I had dragged her off to live in some
faraway place, and the idea of us running into cash flow problems again was an
anathema to her. So I contacted the estate agent through whom we had bought the
flat and had him come over and give us a valuation.
I had a pretty good idea what the flat was worth because I
had been checking what similar properties in the area had been fetching, and
the valuation the agent gave us was close to what I expected. We told him to
put it on the market.
Assuming we got what we were asking, the flat would have
grown in value by almost six times what we had borrowed from the bank, meaning
we could pay off the mortgage and the loan and still have substantially more
than we paid for the flat in the first place.
With the flat on the market, we started viewing flats we
could pay cash for. Inevitably this meant moving to an area where prices were
significantly lower than the area we were leaving because we were determined we
would not over-stretch ourselves. I would not start getting my pension for another
four years and there were no other sources of income on the horizon, so we had
to make do with what we had.
Extract from my book WILL YOU TELL HER, OR SHALL I? A true story. My story. The story of how I lived with the ten-year terminal illness of my wife. Available on www.booksthepublishersmissed.com
Twitter: Maximillian19
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