retz

This is merely the Home Buyer Direct Scheme but a lighter version. Under the original the buyer only put up 5% - 10% and the Government along with the house builder would put up 30%. Bank foots the rest. Only difference is this one they got cheap, must be a sign of the times.

I wonder how much we've blown bombing Gaddafi? Or does someone else foot the bill?

IMO the best places to go would be Thailand and such, emerging democracies (or military juntas) with lots of money to be made by savvy foreigners. Anywhere English is the primary language has already been raped, the only difference is the weather (which I guess could be considered reason enough to leave).

Already got my shock, new tax code of 455L. Somebody has made a balls up, I didn't have £2500 of deductibles last time I checked. :angry:

Buy shares in Green Tech before they shoot up?

Write the report and put in the footnotes the actual facts about how dire the situation is. I find most people either don't read, or know what footnotes are so I reckon you'll get away with it. And if the boss ever comes after your scalp, just tell him the information was in the report you gave him at the bottom of the page.

Same as the house I am in, in fact built by the same people (Taylor Wimpey), same fittings, everything; I bet the bloody gap is the same size as well. You can fit a person and a bike down there quite comfortably. The worst time is the summer, when they crack out the barbecue and the wind proceeds to blow smoke over the fence and into your house. The people who really get screwed in this deal are the bigger houses, I am currently in a 2 bedder, and the bigger houses are simply my house with an extra floor and a bit bigger front, oh and 30-40k bolted onto the price. Not worth it IMO.

Won't the Government also tax the premium? So effectively they would make more than £1000? Or have I got this share malarkey all wrong?

No, they don't mix private and social housing (in the same street). What they do is build a 'social housing' estate first and then directly next to it "over the wall" build a private estate. I know, because the little semi I live in backs onto 2 huge social houses with gardens the size of football fields (and somehow the kid over the back still manages to punt his football into my back garden). I believe for all this Governments meandering that they still have to build a proportion of social houses before they build private ones. Where I live the authorities have just put through new housing to be built, but a certain proportion has to be social. Whether or not they are FTB houses is irrelevant and is purely at the deposition of the builder, at max on most estates you will get 5-10 FTB houses, the rest will be retirement flats or large houses.

You used to be able to claim Benefits from the UK in Spain quite easily, my parents had met people who used to do it. However HMG has cracked down on it considerably; last they heard they had returned to the UK and their house was up for sale. This is pretty much the case for a lot of the ex-pat brigade, make out they have lots of money, when really they are skint and relying on handouts.

Pay rises last year were around 0.5% here. Rumour has it they are not giving any rises this year at all (to the plebs anyway).

"Christine Whitehead, of Cambridge University's centre for housing and planning research, believes "a significant part of this government does not believe in the concept of housing need". And I suppose Cambridge University does? Probably one of the biggest buyers of land and property in the Cambridge area. What about the damaging social effects of buying housing stock and renting it to rich foreigners under the guise of student accommodation? I don't suppose that matters though? Right, Christine? Right? Sorry, bad day.

Modern unions are run by the bourgeoisie anyway, they are just way to get more money out of the proles and control them. If he trully means to take them on good riddance, but I have feeling hes just had one too many glasses of Sherry and will be pulled into line soon enough. Now; real unions are nothing but good for the working man, what is even more shameful is that I don't think there are any true unions left now (if there ever were).

Hmmmphh. This was essentially what the Home Buyer Direct scheme was, but the ConLib Government did the math and realised the return on their money was negligible so they scrapped it. I think the Tories want shared ownership to be done via private companies who build housing (usually designer flats) and allow people to buy in at 25% and staircase their way out, these sort of things usually have a stipulation in the contract that you can only ever buy 95% of the property, the private company always keeps a 5% share.

More or less he just went over old ground but I found the bit where he said something along the lines of "The BOE can no longer sustain the standard of living" or something, which I thought was his way of saying "Shits gonna get real, yo". I was in the gym at the time, and from what I saw I was the only one not watching a scantly clad Cheryl Cole on television. Personally I think I got the raw end of the deal.

Might of meant Carthage, but they were beaten so probably not.

Ugh. Best ones are the carpet cleaning fee or the curtain cleaning fee. They try and charge around £100 to clean some tattered old carpet which is about 15 years old and nearly worn through and around £30 to 'clean' some curtains that cost around £5 which can be bathed in white wine vinegar and a bit of Vanish in the bath tub and look as good as new. Remembering how these sharks work is making me angry! :angry:

Shared ownership is indeed a minefield, but I'll attempt summarise for you what I have learnt: Shared ownership comes in the following forms: 1) Government backed - This is the best bet since rate rises are often set in stone and put into the contract, an example of this would be HBD scheme (Home Buyer Direct). 2) Housing Associations - Much like the Government one, but at a local level. 3) Private shared ownership - This is where it gets complicated. Contracts in these sorts of agreements are drawn up by lawyers representing the parties involved or are handled by property management sharks with their £70 admin fees and such. They often have loopholes to stop any loss coming the other persons way (you are usually dealing with a landlord or private property firm here), my advice is to stay away from these. It should also be noted that these private firms usually keep at least 5% of the property for themselves, which you can never buy out. I currently only have real experience with the HBD scheme (which I think it is being scrapped??) you get 30% of the house value from the Government and don't pay anything back for 5 years, after this time you pay a set amount back each month until you pay it off (note that what you pay back does not reduce the loan, you are paying a capped interest) the amount you pay back can only reach so much before it can rise no further. Under the HBD scheme you can staircase out by increments of 10% at a time (or more), it is done on the current market value of the house, so if the house price goes up, you pay more, goes down and you pay less (in theory). As for the other items, the house is 'yours' by name so you can do whatever you want to it and are responsible for all costs associated with it i.e. insurance, council tax, repairs, etc. Finally, under this scheme your first mortgage (if you take one) will have higher rates than if you brought the house alone so be wary of this. Hope this helps. *EDIT* And when you sell you pay back the loan at what the house is worth at the time you sell, so if it sells for less you pay back less (again, in theory). You should be careful here as the small print specifies that the Government can take back any losses from you directly if they think you can afford it, as per usual this is very vague and depends on if they want to take back the lost money or not.

This is not really any different from the Union movement in the 60s - 70s. You had different levels of cards (designated by colour) if your card was the wrong colour you didn't get in. For instance my father was an Engineer who worked on oil stuff in the South of the UK, everyone who worked there had to have a pink union card which was the highest level you could go, they turned away a friend of my fathers because he had a green card, which was too low. It is all swings and roundabouts, nothing has changed except that the politicians and elite have cordoned off areas of industry in newer ways they understand (because unions were nasty things which couldn't be controlled and in some cases they were right), so they said everyone needed to have a degree to work now, and wallah you have a compliant, skint workforce. The main reason they did this was to make money from higher education and of course take power away from the militant leaders in the workforce. Some call this progress.

My father used to be a Engineer on the old coal trains.

Sounds good, we can build them from Taxpayer money and then sell them to the French. Oh wait a second... Dave doesn't have any relatives who work for EDF by any chance?

I do not believe so. This document merely states that the Spanish Government recognise your property as a legal 'dwelling', your land can still be taken at will, whenever they please (big arguments about this as your link shows). Pretty much you have to get a Government contracted surveryor or architect to come round, look at your property and certify it has, for example: 3 bedrooms, a lounge, a kitchen and a bathroom. They sign off and you get your piece of paper stating you are legal and they can't tear your house down for breaking the law. That is about it, oh and it means you can sell your house.

Property in Spain now requires a new type of document, these are being made 'ultra-rare' by the local authorities. It pretty much says that the house you are living is 'legal'. I know of British couples paying thousands of pounds to various authorities to get them this piece of paper saying their house is legit. Pretty much what happened was people went over there and started sticking houses up in the 'Campo' (rural countryside), these were illegal, and for a while they were allowed to get away with it, however all being equal people are naturally greedy so they built extensions and other houses on the land they had legally brought (without proper permission you can't build on any land regardless of whether you have 5 or 500 hectares). The law is that you can build on any land where an existing structure exists - but you can only build something as big as or smaller than the original dwelling (oh and it has to be listed as a dwelling in the first place). Eventually the Government says 'That is it, we've had enough' and went around tearing down these new homes. Near my parents they literally sent in armed Swat teams to arrest a British couple who had built their house on National park land. They also tore down the place they were living in. For anyone interested, thanks to this new requirement a large proportion of houses that were built by Spanish people are actually illegal. My parents home for instance is legally built, or is it? Nobody actually seems to know, not the local council or the provincial council. The only ones who know are the folks in Barcelona, and every time you visit them they merely shrug and say 'Mañana'. (You quickly learn in Spain that this word means 'a couple of weeks' instead of tomorrow). The Police and civil service have recently taken 5% pay cuts across the board, so no one really has any incentive to do anything, although when I went last time they had policemen with guns on the roundabouts raiding pretty much every lorry/truck that went by. Grocery prices have gone up, as has petrol and other consumables, on the plus side booze is still quite cheap. The Spanish authorities know how to keep their people happy, they have a law where most restaurants have to serve a 'menu del dias' which cannot be more than about 10 - 12 euro and a lot of the time they give free wine. Theft has also gone up, quite a few British people living in communities (Brits love other Brits it seems) have been robbed and their houses vandalised.

Aren't they in the process of buying pretty much every UK bank? They are taking over a lot of the RBS branches, seems like they are doing an RBS all over again.

Yeah they walked past the office in Cambridge, only about 50 of them if that, was tempted to let them in. They were shouting something like "Stop the cuts!" while holding placards with their manicured nails and their fancy haircuts blowing in the wind. All in all not very exciting. Edit: On further reading there appears quite a few of them a little further down the road, must of missed the real crowd.