Limon

Something relevant from the FT: Buy-to-let sell-off precedes mortgage tax relief cuts TL,DR: landlords starting to sell off leveraged properties en mass (particularly family homes rather than higher yielding flats) because of the change in taxation, after finding it impossible to maintain their profit margins by raising rents. However, many landlords remain unaware of the change and are likely to have an unpleasant surprise upon talking to their accountants next year.

I'm playing the long game.

15% of joint takehome on a repayment mortgage in Bristol; early thirties.

I find it hard to credit that prices have risen that much in only three years unless something truly remarkable has happened in their area. Suspect they're grossly overvaluing their place.

There are lots of places in Wales that I'd sooner live in than Easton...

Student loans are so completely different to conventional debt (your obligation to repay a conventional debt is independent of your income, and it won't go away if you just sit and wait long enough) that it makes perfect sense to treat them separately. Chances are that the woman in particular is earning below the repayment threshold and will get her "debt" wiped without ever having to repay a penny, so in that sense it's a purely fictitious number.

The quoted paragraphs are all you get on this guy; the rest of the article is basically an advert for HtB presented as a glossed-up explanation of how it works and what the Ts&Cs are.

> Works in extremely cyclical industry > Doesn't set aside enough cash during the feast years to ride out the famine > Expects sympathy AFAIK it's to subsidise research into increasing the efficiency of extraction, extending the life of the north sea fields (good luck with that if the low prices persist for another year; all the rigs will be shuttered and that'll be that for British north sea oil).

Apologies for quoting too much of the article in the OP. One of the most interesting points it made was that according to polling commissioned by the Bank, 15% of BTL investors would sell up if the rental income no longer exceeded their mortgage payments, and a further 45% would sell if house prices fell by 10% or more. Given the quantity of housing they control, that'd be a massive sell-off into the teeth of a downturn.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0a779ad4-c37d-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3yNBedayb Excerpted:

FFS, not again.

It'll actually be just below £2.8k per month since she presumably has a student loan on top of her income tax and NI obligations. Saving over 70% of your net salary is pretty bloody frugal.

Talk. To. Your. Solicitor. He or she is a qualified legal professional and will be able to provide you with an authoritative and informed answer. Do not ask the internet, it's full of know-nothing blowhards who like to pretend to know a lot more than they actually do.

I'll start with a disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer or any kind of property specialist. However, as I understand it, you're under no obligation whatsoever to agree to any modification to a contract that has already been signed, so it's perfectly reasonable to say that you won't consent to the modification unless you're suitably compensated. However, the landlord will be able to evict you in six months if the dispute becomes heated or unresolvable, assuming you've signed a standard AST.