When you settle down to watch your favourite Christmas films over the next few weeks you might want to spare a thought for the characters’ bank balances, as new research has revealed just how expensive their homes are.
Which? mortgage advisers looked at the four homes featured in ‘Bridget Jones’, ‘Home Alone’, ‘The Holiday’ and Charles Dicken’s novel ‘A Christmas Carol’.
Despite none of the films depicting uber-rich characters, Which? found the characters are all paying at least £3,000 a month in mortgage repayments. Jeez.
Which? calculated the cost of the famous fictional Christmas homes, how much deposit you’d need, and how much the mortgage repayments would be.
First up: Bridget Jones’ one-bedroom flat in Borough Market, London. Situated in the heart of zone one, the estimated property value is a whopping £693,000, which is pretty impressive for a single woman who, for most of the film, works as a failing journalist and TV producer. The monthly mortgage repayments would be £3,000 and would require a deposit of £69,300.
The McCallister family home in Chicago from ‘Home Alone’ is a 14-bedroom detached Georgian house, with an estimated value of £1.53 million. This would require monthly mortgage repayments of £5,800 and a deposit of £306,000 – we definitely wouldn’t mind being left home alone in a house like that.
That dreamy cottage in ‘The Holiday’ in Surrey is valued at £882,000, despite being a 40 minute train-ride away from London (not to mention at the end of that long lane). A property of that value would need monthly mortgage repayments of £3,800 and a deposit of £88,200.
But perhaps the most surprising of the four, given its notoriously stingy owner, is the cost of Ebenezer Scrooge’s house in London. When Dickens wrote the book in 1843 it might have made more financial sense, but 175 years later, the estimated value of his house is £980,000, with monthly mortgage repayments of £3,500 and a £245,000 deposit.
David Blake of Which? mortgage advisers said: “Buying a home can be one of the biggest financial decisions you’ll ever make, so it’s important you can separate the facts from the fiction.” You don’t say...