‘I was in a dark place. Now I'm moving house to restart motherhood'
My divorce was turbulent. I was left in my thirties to bring up three children, with no financial contribution or involvement from their father. We split the equity from our marital home 50/50 and with that I took on a mortgage on my four-bedroom town house in St Albans, Hertfordshire, but only by maximising my mortgage loan and putting £10,000 on a credit card to secure the house. I didn't want to, but we needed a home, and I also knew that paying rent wasn't getting me anywhere [says Sabrina Ponte, 59].
It was quite simple: I had to work, and hard. I got a job at a publisher, HR Grapevine, selling online advertising. I had a base salary, but commission went up and down. My employer was supportive, but the responsibility was mine. After three years I started to get into trouble with the mortgage payments: it just became too much. The credit card loan had climbed from the original £10,000 that I borrowed to £40,000 after interest was applied. I was too proud to ask my parents or friends for help, so I just dealt with it myself. I sought the advice of a debt management adviser. They told me that I should stop paying it back and consolidated the debt for me.
It took me six years in total to clear it. It was one of the darkest times of my life — we had little money to live on after I paid off the mortgage and loan. I tried to make Christmas and birthdays special, but there wasn't much else. I did up my daughters' bedrooms myself, stripped wallpaper and re-painted their wardrobes, putting new handles on.
• Read more expert advice on property, interiors and home improvement
My main thoughts were always to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table and them safe. Due to my full-time job, I was unable to attend many key moments such as school plays, concerts and some sports days. I do feel sad about that. In sales you need to put the hours in to get the deals so that's what I did.
My children are now in their thirties, and by re-mortgaging I was able to help them get onto the property ladder. I have shown them that if you work hard, you can own a home and I'm proud that each of them has achieved that. When the last of my three moved out, I knew it was time to move on. I have put them first my whole life. I have a new partner and it's a second chance at love.
My house has meant so much, but we want to be together. Since the house down the road took over a year to sell, I decided to try a new sales approach. I used Springbok; it takes cash offers with no chains. It sold in two months.
The plan is to rent together close to the school gates, but so far we have found it hard to secure a property and I have had to extend the completion date on my house. Most letting agents appear to be unresponsive or slow at getting viewings — we were prepared to put down the deposit on one place without seeing it to speed up the process, but they had tenants that they couldn't shift.
• 'To ease the pain of my divorce, I transformed my home'
I will cry buckets when I close the door on this house, but I have achieved what I set out to. The house sold for £460,000 and I have a mortgage to clear of £100,000 so that's a great nest egg. My partner is a builder, and we dream of buying a plot of land after two years and building our own home.
It does feel like a second chance at motherhood too. I love my children dearly, but at times it was tough and I had to be both mum and dad to them: do the hard bits, the discipline, the homework nagging, the picking them off from the floor when they had a bad time, you name it. This time round, it's more like being a grandparent — we have my partner's child 50 per cent of the time and I can do all the fun bits that I wasn't always able to do with my own.
I also skip the real challenges — I don't have to go to parents' evening and when there is a need to be strict, I hand him back to his dad.
I am excited to be mortgage-free even though it has been so important to me to have a property for most of my life — the difference is that this time all my children are grown up and I just get to nurture and have fun playing mum again but without the stresses first time around. New walls equal new chapters and I can't wait.
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