A single mother says she’s contemplating selling her house and moving into a motorhome after her mortgage payments have soared by 55 percent thanks to rising inflation.
Abigail Tunstall, 49, became a homeowner in Truro, Cornwall in 2004 when she bought her three-bedroom property for £180,000.
The ex-NHS nurse has been paying her monthly mortgage of £360 after switching away from a fixed-rate deal in 2018.
The mother of two, who has multiple physical disabilities and hasn’t been able to maintain full-time employment since 2013, is largely reliant on disability benefits to support her younger disabled son.
However, with the continued surge in food and utility costs, alongside mounting mortgage payments, she’s finding it hard to keep the ship afloat.
However, her payments have now leapt to £560 following a series of hikes since January 2022. And following today’s inflation announcement, another increase is on the horizon.
Barclays, her mortgage provider, notified her via text message today that the base rate on her tracker mortgage would climb from 4.5% to 5%. But Abigail estimates that the total could reach close to 6%.
She suspects the impact “won’t be pretty” and says she has been considering moving into a second-hand motorhome.
Abigail, who served as an NHS nurse until 2012, said: “My financial life has imploded. Food is through the roof, and everything else is going up in price.
“People have been clinging on by their fingertips but people will start losing their homes the way things are going. There’s a queue for social housing as long as your arm here, so there’s nowhere else to go.”
She added: “I’ve been looking at RVs because it’s the only option besides going homeless. At least that way, you have a roof and walls and power.”
Abigail is solely responsible for her son, who needs a stairlift and top-quality wifi for her son’s home schooling, and the mortgage payments on their house.
This has meant money has been tight; over the winter, they had to forego heating due to high utility bills, with the temperature in their home dropping to just nine degrees.
The former nurse said she gets a “tiny bit of assistance” as a disabled family but adds the £150 payments “doesn’t even touch the sides” when her mortgage is rising by £200 a month.
She said: “There are people out there in worse situations than me too – such as paying for childcare. There just isn’t enough money to go round and it feels like today is the tipping point.
“It’s incredibly stressful, which doesn’t help your health when you’re already disabled. But I’ll just have to battle until I can’t battle any more to give my son the security to finish his GCSE’s.
“Something has to be done because nobody can afford what’s going on.”
This article was crafted with the help of AI tools, which speed up Express.co.uk’s editorial research. A content editor reviewed this content before it was published. You can report any errors to [email protected].
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