Charterhouse

It's funny, I am SOOO bearish and yet I am a bull compared to the population here. In the City I am garnering a real reputation for how bearish I am on equities and the real economy.

I think I want to have sex with that guy. Totally agree. Would rather ****** the chick though obviously.

I do that last bit anyway, but at the moment apparently Fidelity just trap all the commission and keep it, as I am self-advised. The guys I am looking at is Cavendish Online.

The "sea view" ones are either a long way down the promenade i.e. not walking distance or they are the big chains, most of the rooms of which are not sea views at all. Don't get me wrong there are a few smaller family run places where you can get in for that sort of money but they are not boutiquey style and get booked up a long way in advance from my experience - i.e. try searching for availability at http://www.paskins.co.uk/

Mate, go look at hotels in Brighton. The top end charge far more than this and all the boutique types charge £150-£160 a night at the weekend. And it's damn hard to actually find a room there at the weekend that isn't in one of the godawful chain hotels (which, btw charge £120 a night+ themselves). Do some research.

What's the ken? I have my cash (as I've mentioned before) with Fidelity Funds Supermarket. That means I keep all my accounts and various investments in one place which is very easy to deal with. However I was looking at some non-Fidelity funds the other day and some of them have initial charges of up to 5%. A client told me I can get most of those fees refunded if I do the trade via a discount broker. How does it work? Basically I pay the discount broker a fixed fee of £20 per plan (so about 0.3% on 7,200), and when the broker receives the 5% (or whatever) commission, he reinvests it into the plan. So I actually get 7,200 into my plan instead of £6,840. In addition every year, the broker takes the per year commission (usually about 1% a year) and keeps £10 of it, and reinvests the rest for you. If the commission is less than £10 he does not charge you more, just keeps it. Why does it work? Because the discount broker does not offer advice so has very low overhead costs. He attempts to do high volumes and charge a fixed fee which allows him to still make money. Where's the catch? Well that's exactly it, I'm looking for one. So far this seems amazing for ISAs and even more amazing for more commission heavy products such as life assurance, with-profits bonds etc etc Anyone know where the catch is or is this as good as it looks?

haha I'm enjoying it now I've stopped letting myself react to some of the more incendiary threads and posters. Hopefully actually contributing something of value at times as well.

Nope. Wasn't old enough in 1997 but wouldn't have done. Since then definitely not.

The one in Brighton, if you spent 100k turning it into more of a boutiquey place, with maybe 8 rooms instead of 13 (the current ones look ok but small), and then got £150/night. Assume full occupancy Friday and Saturday night and zero the rest of the time you'd turn over £250k a year. Maybe more for room service and booze. Looks ok. So why am I not convinced....

Would you prefer this http://www.sterligoff.com/ which is presented as an alternative? People will find a way to rip you off whatever the system is, sadly.

As I've said before, that is something that does not necessarily make shared equity a bad idea, it just means you have to be a lot more careful about not getting ripped off. But I obviously agree.

Sure, one main thing. You state something about how paying nearly as much as the full purchase price of a property bought through shared equity is in some way "thievery". Well the reality is that if you look at the way that these schemes work, assuming that you do not purchase any further equity beyond your 50%, you end up paying for half a house, and renting half a house. This is effectively equal to paying the interest on the whole house, but only owning half of it, which is why the total paid over 25 years would be so high. This is not thievery however, it is simply a consequence of not having the requisite deposit/credit worthiness to buy a whole house. If you had that, you could buy a whole house. Even in that case, the interest would still be huge, but this is a feature of debt, not "thievery", and much though certain members of this forum would argue that debt is slavery etc etc, the reality is that you don't have to sign up to borrow money. If you do, you have to pay interest. I think that describing interest as thievery makes you sound like some sort of anarchist and is very unlikely to encourage your MP to look kindly on your situation. Apologies for the initial tone of my feedback, as I said it was in response to the rather whingey tone of the letter rather than its actual content, which I broadly agree with and sympathise with your position. Sadly I think you are barking up the wrong tree as Labour represent as big a property market VI as exists.

Look I agree with his sentiment, my "cry more" is in response to the incredibly whingeing tone of the letter which is going to make his MP bin it straight away. The lack of understanding of a few key issues in the letter will not help either.

Nice job linking something totally irrelevant to his point. Show me the stats where a 60k is in the 95th percentile of mid 30s professionals in the South East, which is what he said. I bet it's not. But I don't think those stats exist anyway, so whatever.

Cry more. Your MP will probably laugh at this, the least you could have done is run it through a spell checker.