Financial help with living costs whilst building up a property business

I resigned from my job a few months ago to concentrate on renovating property with my partner. Our existing handful of rental properties generate enough income to pay their mortgages plus our residential mortgage. My partner also runs an online retail business but is finding it hard to cover all of our living costs. 

I have looked at various means of lowering our living costs, such as renting out our residential property, or selling it to move to a smaller one. However, with no salary, and even with our rental income and my partner’s income from his online business, we would not even be able to get a residential mortgage on a property half the value of one of our rental houses. If we sold one of our rental properties we would lose an income that helps to pay our residential mortgage, so would be in a worse situation after we had used up the net income from any sale.

I have looked at claiming income support to help supplement our income, but it seems that with the net worth that we have from our houses, thatI would be unable to claim benefits. My question is does anyone know if there is a benefit or suchlike that I might be eligible for (which does not require paying back), to help with living costs whilst developing a property business – where the capital from property precludes claiming benefit, but yet the whole poiint of the business is to build up the capital – yet the business does not yet generate enough income to be completely self-sufficient on.

Many thanks for any thoughts

Anonymous