Diver Dan

What I'd like to know is why would you choose an occupation such as lie to bet landlording if it makes you so demonstrably unhappy to deal with tennants? There have got to be easier and more pleasent ways to make a quid.

I wound up in Dublin before Christmas and since I missed the last bus home, ended up staying in a hotel slap-bang in the middle of the IFSC. Without even asking, they reduced the room price to €45 and upgraded me to one with a view of the Liffey, added a WiFi and breakfast vouchers. The place was pretty much empty though. I've certainly noticed on television that there are a lot of adverts for Disney in Florida and Paris focussing on low(er) prices. They must be getting desperate for bookings. Ryanair and Easyjet seem to be reducing routes in Western Europe too.

But surely it can't cost that much to pay a bloke to go round with a lawn-mower, hedge-clippers and some shovels once a fortnight to give the garden a quick tidy-up? I guess it's because the whole buy to let model only works if you don't actually buy the property in the first place. If so, then why should the landlord care if the garden is overgrown? With the waffer-thin margins a lot of these landlords must be working with, every penny counts.

And how much will the council end up spending to clear up the mess of the inevitable rise in fly-tipping?

I know someone who was trying to sell a Rover 800 for £2,000 about 5 years ago and the only offer he got was for £500 which he refused because he thought that the car "looked a million dollars". The car is still sitting there, taking up room in his driveway with flat-spotted tyres and covered in mildew. I think that this woman was likely the same as this. Large cars always depreciate faster than small cars.

Did RM ever get around to publishing what people thought about those pictures of horrible new-build flats from a few months ago?

I wonder if the people who sold these holiday homes will change their business models and make a nice little earner "marketing" peoples' holiday houses as timeshares for £2K each or £4K for a "premium listing"? Just to hoover up the last few pounds still in the system.

Westminster needs to be cleared out regularly. One of the main problems as I see it is that there are too many long-standing MPs who get re-elected to safe seats election after election. I'm of the opinion that MPs should have a 2 term limit and then have to step down at the next GE for a period of at least 5 years. You could possibly allow them to run for a third term if the MP has reached the level of senior cabinet minister at the end of his second term. Having a 5+ year break would allow the MP to see how the world actually works. I.e. you have to pay for your house and travel out of your wages.

A well presented flat in a reasonably nice part of Aberdeen with a reasonable price tag? Surely there's been a mistake here. I'd say it's an agent baiting their hook by offering a low "offers over" to generate interest while the seller isn't even going to look at anyone with less than £90K to spend.

I'm currently thinking about moving to France as I work in a job where I am away for month at a time and then home again for a month. This means that I can live pretty much anywhere I want within reason. Do you know anything about the tax implications of living in a country but earning your money elsewhere?

I'm sorry, but £24000 is a lot of money, the problem is that houses cost an awful lot of money. I believe that my original scenario of cash rich people refusing to buy a house could come true. If you had £24000 of liquid assets to spend, invest and enjoy as you see fit is going to be quite tempting to keep (and increase) such a large nest-egg rather than use it to put a down-payment on a pile of bricks.

I could imagine a situation whereby a large cohort of would-be FTBs build up big deposits (big in real terms as in able to buy plenty of loaves of bread, holidays etc) but they never end up having enough to buy the type of house they want (possibly due to nominal prices rising faster than they can save) and so put off buying indefinitely. Socioogists might call them CRABs - Cash Rich but Avoiding Buying. The couple in the article are a case in point £24,000 is a lot of money and should be more than enough for a deposit on a nice house with plenty to spare to buy furniture.

It sounds like she seriously needs to buck up her ideas and reassess priorities. Perhaps starting the new year at the bottom would be the best thing for the Copeland family. If they end somewhere better than a pine box in 12 months time, it'll be a bonus. Bob Dylan said it best, "When you ain't got nothing, you ain't got nothing to lose." But Henry's Cat said "If at first you don't succeed, try failing", so he might have had a point as well.

The reason they don't sell to rent is that they know exactly how most landlords behave towards their tenants. Edit to add: If these people in receipt of SMI have been making a profit why the bloody hell haven't they been saving the excess for when the scheme ends? SMI was supposed to be a sort of "stay of execution" to allow homeowners a bit of breathing space while they sorted out their job / financial situation, not a free meal ticket for the rest of their lives.

The message they want to get across is that as soon as houses are sold for their '(f)rightful' prices, the economy will grow.

Maybe the owner could figure out how to program those robots to help move it.

I notice that along with the giraffe on the inside, they've parked a Porsche on the outside. What are people's thoughts on expensive cars placed outside houses in adverts on Rightmove? Does it add a sense of upper middle class allure or do folk just think that they just borrowed a friend's fa*ny-magnet for the afternoon and it makes no difference to the desirability of the house?

A little bit off topic, but has anyone else noticed that in the BBC TV show, "Outnumbered", the family is gradually getting poorer as the series progresses. They lose their newish car and are in the progress of moving out of their biggish house, the mother loses her job etc. Little things like these appear to be building up. It might be interesting to watch the next series when it comes out. On the subject of the Good Life, I remember listening to a programme on the radio a few years ago about self-sufficient farming and the expert said that there was no way that two people could feed themselves on what they could grow in a suburban garden and an allotment.

The muppet from post 34 is exactly the type of person who will vote for the party that claims to represent the "Squeezed Middle". I've made some silly mistakes with my time, treasure and talent in the past but thank goodness I never let it get that bad.

Or to put it another way: When did people start thinking they could live a Bond Villain's lifestyle on a mere henchman's salary?

I usually base my voting decision on the party that is most likely to beat the party that I least want to win. Where I live, the split is between Lib-Dem and Labour with the Tories a distant fourth after Scot-Nat; so I voted Lib Dem (Labour still won). I hope this doesn't turn into one of those, "What's the point of voting? They're all in it for themselves" threads. Voting is the one chance that you get to do something where the political cosa-nostra have to take notice. Do you think that those protests in London will have any affect on what the government decides? Ask the Countryside Alliance how they got on opposing the hunting ban. The only lever of power the ordinary man or woman has is to vote for the least worst politician in their particular area.

There's a place in Northern Ireland and they keep trying to gentrify the name of it by sticking the word "London" in front. How bizarre is that?

I'm not sure if this has been added yet: HEARTLESS, INSENSITIVE OLD TORY ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON

You should do what I did and throw the bloody box in the bin. That way you can go on a licence fee payers' strike and they legally can't touch you. After the initial shock of not having a magic lantern in your life, you find that there are other more interesting things to do of an evening.

Where else can you live if not at home? They get cross if you try to live at work and living on holiday could get expensive before very long. I'm 29 and share a flat but I'm often as not outside the Kingdom of Unity on business.