Tuesday 14th November 2017

Back to the story.

Luckily the house sale went through smoothly this time. It was a bit of nail biting for the next 3 months. We knew that if the sale fell through again we would have to give up on Cyprus and return to the UK.

During the week we stayed with Emil in Nicosia, and most weekends we spent in the villa on the coast. A few times we managed to get a hire car for a weekend, that gave Emil a break from running us back and forth. It also gave us chance to explore a bit more and learn what was about in the Paralimni area.

The villa we were renting was in a small place called Ayia Thekla, which is very close to Ayia Napa.  We did manage to get to know a few people living in the same area of Ayia Thekla, but with only being there weekends we didn’t really get totally settled in at the villa.

We had booked our 2 cats Garfield and Jasper, into a cattery before we left the UK. We only expected it to be for a few weeks, but with everything that happened it obviously turned into 3 months. We had to find the extra money for that as well, I think we had initially paid for 3 weeks for them.

Eventually everything went through with the house sale and we finally got completion on it. We then had to work out what we were paying off and how much money we could put aside to get established in Cyprus.

We paid the mortgage off and the 2nd secured loan we had on the house. Obviously paid the solicitor and estate agency that had sorted the sale for us. I think that left us about £10k in the bank to try to sort out any other debts we could, plus get what we needed in Cyprus.

First thing was to sort out getting our 2 cats to us, I think that alone was about £1200. Next was to get a car so we could get around, that was around £3000. We paid to get satellite internet fitted at the villa so Hales could work, that was another £1500!

Paid off a couple of small debts, I think it was overdrafts mostly. We then bought a few bits so we had everything we needed to finally get settled and established a bit better. That was about it from what was left from the house sale!

We still had a lot of outstanding debt, I think it was around £15k. We both had had credit cards, plus store cards and catalogues.  Over the next few months we managed to get in touch with them all or the debt collectors who were chasing the money, to arrange payment plans to pay them all off. That actually ended up taking us 4 or 5 years, but that’s a different story!

I had managed to make friends with a guy who lived just round the corner from us, Martin. He had his own property management company which included looking after swimming pools. He offered me a couple of days work a week helping him with doing the pools. It wasn’t a huge amount but with Hales wages it gave us enough to live on .

That will do for today, I will continue the story soon.

Rob

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