Dear Rhonda,

I am an avid reader of all of your books, including The Power, and I thought that you may like my story.

I asked the Universe for help. I even wrote out a cheque and made it payable to myself with the date open-ended. I stuck it on the kitchen wall with cello tape. This is what happened,

Two and a half years ago I wanted to buy my council flat, and my local Council said yes I could, and that I qualified for the maximum discount of 70 % of my flat’s value. That was £165,000 which is about $195,000. The discount at 70% was £112,000, which is about $133,000.

My first port of call was my bank, Barclays, as I had been with them for 25 years. I explained my situation and because I had £7,000 in my account all that I needed was the difference of £48,000  or $56,000 so that I could go ahead and buy my flat.

They came back to me and said, ‘Oh if you had come to us last month we would have given you the money.’

’So why not now, what’s changed in a month? I asked.

’Covid’ they said.

‘What’s Covid got to do with it?’

‘Well up till last month, the lending age was capped at 85 years of age, and due to Covid the age had been dropped down to 70, and you, Geoff, are 72.’

It was like, just go away and die. As far as the banks were concerned, everyone over 65 was going to die of Covid. So for the next 18 months, I approached all the lenders, banks, building societies, and brokers, and they all came back with the same answer. ‘You are too old. You do not have enough income.’ I was on £14,000 a year, my pension, and my disabled benefit.

Then a local broker said that he had found one lender, the ‘Leeds Building Society’ who was prepared to lend me the money. Wow fantastic, I thought. That was on a Tuesday. That evening Boris Johnson, the Uk Prime Minister, came on the 6 o’clock news and said, ’As of today, the whole country is going on lockdown.’ The very next day the lender pulled out and I was back to square one.

Another 8 months goes by and I found another broker named Stewart, online, 200 miles away in Harrogate. He plodded away at it for 3 months then came back to me and said that he had approached 400 lenders in the UK all saying the same thing. ‘You are too old. You do not have enough income.’ However, he had found one, and guess what?

It was the same lender as before, Leeds.

He had asked to borrow the money over 13 years, and they came back with a better offer of 11 years with a fixed mortgage. A few weeks later last February, I signed on the dotted line, and then I went back to the lender and asked if I could rent out the flat. I told them that one of my daughters has a spare bedroom for me. They refused and said that I would have to wait a year and then re-apply because I was a new borrower.

Then my daughter found a clause on the government website that said, ‘Whether you own the property that you live in, or even if it is a council flat, you can rent out one room for a maximum of £7,500 a year without having to pay any tax! So within 5 days, I found a tenant willing to pay £625 a month for a room and share the kitchen and bathroom. My mortgage is only £350 a month, and I now have my flat. Something to leave my daughters when I die.

Speaking of death now that I am 75, the oldest man in the UK died at the beginning of the year and he was 114 years old. That means I have 38 years to live!

The moral of the story is to never give up on your dream.

Regards
Geoff