longtomsilver

I need to start eating and cooking well again for the family. I'll be bringing the slow cooker out of retirement. Food in getting expensive again in the big four supermarkets (especially meets and I too noticed Smoked Salmon has for now been priced out of my basket). MrsLTS sells into the supermarkets (non-grocery) and price rises are coming in July. The 'supermarket' that is trying to protect consumers from price inflation is simply substituting branded Chinese tat (with a whiff of quality) for Chinese tat of no quality at all. She's lost £3million of orders next quarter with them and won't be getting the business back, they've switched to a non-branded line completely. As for Aldi/Lidl, other than fruit and vegetables, and bread products from Lidl the rest of the stuff they sell is carp.

I bought a Skoda CitiGo in November last year and haggled for such a good deal that they paid me £382 to take the car off the forecourt. The minimum deposit was meant to be £500 but I point blankly refused until they agreed to refund all but the first payment. So I paid £500 upfront and they took it off by fudging the options on the finance agreement (filling in a negative cost). How did I afford the first £118? I don't know 0% too and had for a very good price.

I bought £37,500 in the FTSE 250 tracker as mooted here and am currently up £1,100. The original plan was to drip feed and hopefully lower the average but with the index at an all time high should I take profits now to reinvest on a correction. Ultimately, I want to have £75k in here.

If I remember correctly Amazon applied an incredibly sophisticated AI model to automate their pricing and the end result was ludicrous differentials on the same products between themselves and Amazon Market sellers set pricing against each other. Junk in, junk out... in a trading environment i'd expect to see spontaneous boom and busts on steroids when two or more bots inevitably compete in the same space. Financial spam if you like.

Thanks Mrs Bear. You've given me an idea... for some reason I can't edit my comment into your quote. Package care homes.

I got 4% which is like a nominal 10p on top of the NMW but they made us sign new guaranteed minimum hour contracts (tearing up the old one) reducing my hours by one 'block' of 4 so doing 12 hours now and not 16. MrsLTS got the maximum 2% payrise (1% effectively net) and a £17,000 bonus pro-rata'd to the time served at her new company which after tax was ~£4k which we are using to take our children to New York in October. Making cut-backs in other areas of our lives to offset the increased cost of living. Paying down debt (car/car/motorcycle) faster too as the future isn't looking so great.

Karcher? ??

The wiping my mum's bottom part frightens me. Everything else I think will be doable cometh the time.

I'm 39 (just) so it's OK I'll stay in blighty

That's a good point... taxy taxy.

1. Improved safety for both the occupants and those outside the vehicle. What's not to like. The increased weight of all these systems probably deducts 2-3mpg from the overall fuel economy figures which must equate to an additional expense of 0.5p per mile. For me that £7.50 a month extra fuel (1,500 miles) is quite some insurance policy. 2. Using exotic and/or lighter materials would not only eat into the manufacturers profits but also feed into a higher a ticket price. Shaving 20% off the cars weight might improve fuel consumption by 3-4mpg offsetting the losses from crumple zones, airbags etcetera... laws of diminishing returns however would mean that £10 monthly fuel saving more than wiped out by the additional £1,500 (£35x42) purchase cost. These are best guesstimates on my own Skoda CitiGo that returned a real 54mpg using just 28.58litres last week to travel 340miles. My Rover Metro returned 38-40mpg. We have come along way since.

Other than what goes into MrsLTS company pension nearly all our cash is/has been allocated to the children's education. There really is no better investment in an increasingly competitive and globalised workforce. I can imagine a time when only the very elite score highly enough in emigration criteria especially as TSHTF in pockets around the world, afterall it is the elite who set the rules.

I put £15k in Ratesetter a few weeks back. The rate offered for five years was 6%+ and I figured the 1% or so fee for rapid withdrawal still puts me ahead of the shorter term bonds. I'll be happy if it does indeed return me £20k as projected.

That'll be soaked up by the manufacturer. I understood that the profit on a car sale for the dealership is only a few hundred quid and that more money is made on the finance, servicing and sales bonuses. Whatever it is it's a well kept secret as there's nothing definitive on the interweb.