Lagarde's Drift

Have you done the sums to see what the difference in total repayment is between the two?

Ah , my mistake. Have you tried suggesting moving out of prime Manchester? In any case, if your maximum offer is rejected or trumped, then why don't you suggest your wife works a bit harder (as I suspect she has told you to!)

Why is this depressing? This sucker is not going to crash until absolutely everyone (maybe except for one or two HPCers) is in with both feet so you should be celebrating and encouraging everyone to be taking out fully spammed out HTB mortgages!

These threads keep coming up & I think the mods should separate them to two categories - "London & South-East" & "Elsewhere". Once again no one has mentioned the option of moving out of SE England for more affordable housing. Then again, the usual ansawer is "There's no way I could move!" The market can remain irrational for far longer than your marriage can withstand. This sucker's not going down for a long time - just buy the damn thing.

Crikey! Ask any Greek in Greece what it was (and is) like!! Crikey!

Yeah it's not holiday homes, and the REIT market is saturated with booby traps but this one is ok. Mainly commercial properties rented to large companies, rather than residential.

I guess there will always be fools and money being parted. I bought some of this My link earlier this year and sold it again to free cash up. I do it online via my stockbroker and it costs a few quid to deal. Seems so easy compared to that experience above - but of course I did not access credit to leverage up my exposure to capital gains(losses).

It is completely replaceable. Just build something somewhere else. Tarmac something else, somewhere else. At the moment it is a very very large strip of tarmac being used to fly tiny aircraft and the occasional commuter. The density of surrounding housing means it will never ever be Bristol's main airport. A very large and costly asset that does nothing and brings no income in - it's a surprise we (Airbus) kept it so long. Much better to sell it and use the proceeds to improve transport links to Lulsgate (doubt that will happen though). Bristol is just another example of polarising society. I am part of the 30-something professionals with great salaries who are buying crap houses purely because it is insane here in Bristol. There is no point going elsewhere because this is where the jobs are. The rest of Bristol just gets poorer and poorer and survive on the various welfare payouts.

Yup. I live in Horfield and prices are through the roof. Stuff like this are selling for close to asking. My link 3 beds in decent nick with a garden +/- garage but in Horfield/Filton/Lockleaze are going for circa £200k. Five years ago they would only dare ask for £185k.

Indeed. I don't normally read the Guardian, but today's Money section has quite a lot of gems. Such as this one from the "pocket money" story: http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/aug/30/pocket-money-how-much This particular couple chimes with us as our joint income is similar, but we don't have any kids nor property/mortgages. Our only big spends are multiple big foreign holidays every year but we still manage to put away a motherload of savings every month (most of which does not stay in cash). I think this couple is heading for a shock if they are already spending that much on their kids. The costs can only go up. That being said, we are friends with many couples, some of whom jointly earn less than the doctor above alone but manage to raise children and stay in reasonable homes so it's all relative I suppose.

But they were not mis-sold, were they? And they were not reassured that bonds were 100% guaranteed, were they? Fools and their money, and all that. The picture of Northern Rock above (and all the Icelandic bank nonsense), people leveraging stupidly to buy property, buying unseen property abroad, or investing in ponzi schemes, etc etc - all illustrates that people will continually want to believe their money is safe in high risk investments, no matter what the small print. Blaming the Co-op for misusing its "safe" reputation is just plain stupid imho. But I don't think you can be convinced of this.

Which is why I don't see PIBs going the same way as PPIs, the info was there and I have not heard anyone crowing about it being mis-sold.

Heh, at the risk of deviation I'd also add: If some con-artist came up to you and said : "Give me your cash, I'll top it up straight away with income tax rebates and company contributions, but you won't have access to it for a few decades. Don't worry, in the meantime I'll grow it at 6% pa and you'll get all these wonderful things when you retire, guaranteed!!" Would you sign up too?

Oh crikey, the new iPhone is "from £529" if you order online from Apple! Jesus wept indeed!!

Not really. When everyone else is struggling to get even 5% yield on their cash & investments, and someone "respectable" comes along and offers you 11-13% guaranteed with no risk to your capital, what would you say? "Sign me up, Toto"? Ditto dodgy burgers from Tesco, Ditto dodgy aircraft from dodgy airlines... etc etc. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I'm not so sure... £300 is >1.5% of £18k.

What are you all on about? Just remember - "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is". Applied to all of the above would ensure Granny does not die in a dodgy plane crash, get food poisoning from "99p for 6" Tesco value burgers or go destitute from con-artists selling "bonds".

Yes, I've mentioned before, I live in Bristol, one of the more expensive cities in the UK. I have rented happily for circa 5 years (my house is a place to live in, but other than being not tiny and not cold, is not the source of my happiness).

Do not like criticism, do we? I did not ask you to stop posting, just pointing out that your posts are getting repetitive. And if you thought I was being rude, I'd be interested in how you fare when the real insults start flying. Anyway, in the hope of making a decent contribution to the thread - the comments about the market, gamed or not, being more solvent than the individual are spot on imho. I've always said that we will not see a crash in England until the last bear on this forum buys, and that is proving to be the case. TBF if I was the buying type I'd have bought long ago - the whole "banks too big to fail" can be reinterpreted as "mortgages for the average Joe are also too big to fail" and it is now political. Probably has been all this time. People have been calling time on this HPI market for many years and are still waiting, ala the OP. My personal solution is to forget the whole FTB/STR nonsense and to just live life and be happy, like other posters on this thread have mentioned. A roof over your head with decent space and heating is only one of the base Maslow needs, perhaps if the OP focuses on the others there could be more happiness?

Yeah for those who say "just move up north", what you say is oh so true. There is a reason why those houses are cheap! Getting tiring, Bruce. I've not seen anyone else post the same thing on this forum, and judging by the popularity of this thread, there aren't many like you. Agreed, but that may be because it is harder to save much as a single person.

Now that's a good reason to have Ubuntu (or some other OS)

I'd be gobsmacked if there are enough rich Ubuntu enthusiasts to raise that kind of money. And that's just for the first round (I'm guessing it's the first round). There are probably lots of people piling in without a true understanding of what the risks are - reminds me of the tech-stock bubble. Nevertheless, if they get far enough to be bought out by a giant then investors may get a good return.

Agree with the last comment, why bother with Ubuntu? The kick in the teeth will come when Android becomes a default computer OS. This product will lose its USP soon enough. Why should I bother with Ubuntu when I can connect any Android (or indeed Apple) phone to a monitor? Indeed, the fact that it boots Android as standard slightly defeats its purpose. I don't see any techno-geeks on here espousing the awesome-ness of Ubuntu over Android either.

Didn't watch the video, but the blog text makes her seem like a proper nutcase - perhaps that is the point - debt is evil etc etc.