gadget

It's because part of the point of a deposit is to show you are not financially stretched and can save a significant sum from your income. Even if the money from mum and dad is a gift, if you haven't been able to save any money yourself then a slight knock might leave you struggling to pay the mortgage.

This seems the likliest explanation. I'd send them evidence of you trading as "kosher food" and see if that helps. Oh and ignore all these posts suggesting you did something wrong using a personal account. If you're a sole trader there's no distinction between you and your business.

Always suprises me the lengths people will go to evade tax. 45k Capital gains. You could do the above and spend the next 10 years worrying about a letter from HMRC. Or you could pay 6k of CGT tax, have no worries and 39k to spend on whatever you want.

To be fair it would be crackers not to have a cutoff. They need to have gone through your February payroll. Otherwise there is nothing to stop you "hiring" 100 friends and family in March, furloughing them and claiming all the money from the governement. This is not theoretical, it would happen. At scale.

Have to say i have little sympathy with the ltd company / dividend issue. Directors pay themselves dividends rather than salary to avoid National Insurance. The point of National Insurance is to pay for / accrue these kind of benefits.

https://www.crowdcube.com/companies/powervault/pitches/bAxVmZ I'm in two minds about utility scale battery storage. Seems a waste to have millions of battery packs in a field somewhere rather than in millions of homes (paired with solar).

These statistically b0llocks / manipulated studies / articles on electric cars or renewable energy keep showing up. I don't know why that is but maybe the massively wealthy oil industry has an idea. Seems something similar happened with health studies on smoking in the mid 20th century.

Not sure it's that clear. Think the minimum of 1 times the deposit includes the deposit. IE you are guaranteed full return of the deposit but not necessarily anything more.

Err... Victoria died in 1901. But anyway that assumes good construction and can be a lot worse with council flats. A relative of mine bought a BTL 70's council flat 10 years ago and literally all the rent over that time has gone out on big bills deemed necessary by the council (new roof, new electrics etc etc)

The reason stamp duty works for shares and property (despite people saying a financial transaction tax will never work because it will just get avoided / transactions will move offshore)is that if you don't pay it you don't own it. Therfore it has to be the buyer who pays...

The letting agent clearly doesn't know what they're talking about. You are not liable for rent until a new tenant is found as you are within the term of the break clause. As to their term about early release penalty charges: that's pretty outrageous. Fortunately i don't think it applies and anyway it's almost certainly unenforceable as an "unfair term". Frankly though if i'd seen that in a tenancy agreement i'd have walked away: even if its unenforceable it marks the agents as nasty pieces of work...

Think this is overblown tbh. The "rich" entrances typically have a 24hrs porter / concierge which means extraordinarily high service charges. The "affordable" flats wouldn't be very affordable if they had to pay these...

Interesting programme. But struck a slight off key on the drug companies. Sure they were just trying to make money, but often eg with the statins example, this would save countless lives http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/crusader-for-statins-was-right-about-the-benefits-of-the-drug-after-all-9617006.html

Don't bring facts into an Internet argument...

Think you've got cause and effect the wrong way round here... It's no surprise that the rich tend to support parties that support the rich... Though plenty of very successful people are bleeding heart lefties too... Sure not the ones who got rich drilling for oil etc. But the music / film / technology industries are chock full of very very rich people who tend to be screaming lefties...