r thritis

Please get rid of it - there is an annoying freeze on every page you visit, while it loads. I'll go to the news blog for news.

CNBC or CBBC?

Agreed, on balance - but there's got to be better that 1 chance in 11 that they'll move earlier.

You can still get 11.5 to 1 on Betfair on a quarter point rise in June. This has to be worth a punt.

Nah - he was just trying to use Microsoft bloody Windows.

Sorry - don't like it. It makes every page much slower to load (at least I assume its the ticker slowing it down). There's an annoying delay (2-3 secs) before you can scroll the page as a whole.

It has? Never seen it advertised down south before. I guess there's easy pickin's to be had at the moment. 29.9% apr. Holy loanshark batman!

A new business on the high street launched with a glossy TV ad. You can now furnish your home and have that plasma telly. Bad credit rating? No problem. Take a look at http://www.brighthouse.info Is this the future direction of the high street?

I just see people launching into debt without any thought to the future. Some friends of ours paid their mortgage on their credit card this month. Are they worried? No. There are always more credit cards, more loans available. Until one day... They just seem totally blind to the reality of their situation though. I wonder how many more are living like this.

It always amazed me that the Tory's stayed in power for another term, after the black wednesday thing. It seems that sometimes our chancellors do not even grasp basic 'primary school' economic issues. Membership of the ERM was a case in point. Under the agreement, each country was expected to prop up its own currency to keep it within the agreed exchange rate bands. This effectively wrote a blank cheque for the currency traders - all they had to do was to push a currency up against the band limits and the government would respond to counteract it. It amounted to free money for the speculators. I guess it was down to the lack of any opposition at the time, that the tories won that election. Sound familiar?

"But Covingham and the town centre remain popular with first-time buyers, said Mr Delaney, thanks to good access to the M4 without being affected by road noise." So the town centre has good access to the M4 whereas other parts or the town do not? How does he figure that out? And of course there's no road noise in Covi at all - with the bleedin' A419 thundering past peoples back garden.

I suppose if you don't want to use the Asda HIP and use your own instead, it would be a hip replacement.

This free HIP thing is very interesting - and as an earlier poster said, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. They will have to cover their costs on the free HIPs. My guess is that they will have some sort of heafty caveat - e.g. if the seller withdraws from the market, they will be liable for the cost of the HIP.

Do you think this is positive reporting? I think it is a totally sh*te article. The whole tone of it is that renting is the best option if you're a complete loser and you can't afford to buy.

I wonder how many shady deals go on with sale prices around the 250k threshold. I few years ago a helpful Estate Agent told me I could offer about 258k and dress the additional 8k of it up as payment for fixtures and fitting etc and still pay just 1% stamp duty. I understand this is common practice. I suspect there may be quite a few dodgy deals involving briefcases full of cash, for sale prices between 250 and 300k.

Thanks for that link. arf arf.

Yuk - don't like the sound of those! It seems like there's no end to the ingenuity of the CC companies. It always used to make me laugh when Barclaycard used to send out a little catalogue with the monthly bill, just in case you couldn't think of anything to buy with your credit card!

Sorry to be a dimwit - but what is a credit card cheque? How does it differ from just buying something on your credit card? I've never heard of them.

I was astounded that they would devote an entire broadcast to slagging off the tory leader. What happenned to fighting issues on policy. It just shows that they have completely given up hope of winning any debate on policy.

Unfortunately, just like cockroaches, they're resiliant little b*ggers. The if the internet was going to kill them off it would have done so long before now.

The 'ladder' will instantly adjust to consume this extra cash. He might as well just write a cheque for £970m and hand it straight to the property developers. Without shared ownership schemes, these people would get to own all of a home instead of half of it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4832848.stm "Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott would give details of plans for £970m for shared equity schemes to help 35,000 people get onto the housing ladder" The 'ladder' will instantly adjust to consume this extra cash. He might as well just write a cheque for £970m and hand it straight to the property developers. Without shared ownership schemes, these people would get to own all of a home instead of half of it. EDIT - whooa! Parallel thread. Sorry Desperate Housewife.

Mags - I was making no comment on the rosiness or otherwise of the Housing market (in this thread at least). All I was doing was pointing out a fundamental flaw in the logic of drawing any conclusions from the 5% reduction in lending from Jan --> Feb.

You can't really generalise. There are a wide range of views expressed on this forum, some of which are pretty odious. That's the price of free speech.

You can't pay off the priciple with IO. So if you overpay, assuming no penalties, you will just pay off the interest earlier. There is nothing to stop you investing the additional £150 elsewhere though, and if you manage to get a better return than the amount of the principle over the term, you will have beaten the repayment mortgage.