Charles_Darke

Ever heard of stamp duty or solicitor's fees?

If you're not getting wage inflation, then you're not going to get a real HPC caused by wage inflation effects. Thing is, can you count on nominal falls?

I disagree. Assuming you don't want to rent for life, you were previously short on property and had to buy. This means you were exposed to property prices and if then went up, you'd have to pay more. Now that you have just the property you need, you are hedged. So you are no longer exposed to property prices as it doesn't matter whether they go up or down for you since you're just going to live there. Only those short (houseless/STR) or long (BTLers) are exposed to house prices as they will have to either buy or sell at a future date.

Four toilets?

Good luck moosetea. I'm sure you'll love it!

I think he might be referring to Gordon's masterful management of UK assets when he sold off 60% of the UK's gold reserves at just $275 an ounce (close to a 20-year low). Well done GB! That's £4bn down the drain then.

Not if you generate power using nuclear. Seems to me that the UK govt are waking up to the fact that nuclear power is the only viable future energy source for the UK and that they're now trying to work out how to convince the UK voter's of that.

Maybe the best 50% will get taken first. Or the cheapest 50%.

For some reason, this quote makes me think of a quote about internet and tubes...

Self-selecting sample. Those that are still around to be compared are obviously the ones that need to be reduced to sell.

ERM. You forgot to tax the interest on the account. Which would mean a return of £118k rather than £213k.

5.9% APR fixed for the next 5 years.

I think the point is, if you buy a home, you don't care about the cost of it any more. It's a place to live in, not a profit-making machine as some STRers/BTLers on here think.

Maybe they did, but I bet you they'll have the ear of politicians. Like it or not, you can expect future policies to pander to the home-owners. The fact that FTBs are being screwed over won't matter.

I was saying that physical presence isn't enough to guarantee job safety. If you disagree, that's fine, but you seem to be arguing against yourself in that case.

Can't tell if you're agreeing or mis-reading.

Plumbing can't be done off-shore or on-line either... You need something with high barriers to entry too.

Not always, you also have to consider gearing and tax. Let's say you bought a property for £100k with £10 deposit. You got a nice fixed rate mortgage so paying £3k IO mortgage interest. The property today is worth £300k, but you're renting it out £12k - a poor yield but a great return on your initial capital invested. Argument is that the yield is poor. Let's look at the alternative (sell and put cash in a bank). You sell for £300k less £4k of fees giving you £180k in the bank at 5% gives you £9k interest a year. At this point, the keep vs sell is about the same. However, if your mortgage fix expires, you suffer additional 2k of costs. Of course, this all ignores capital appreciation, which at 8% means you might be happy to have 2k less of pre-tax yield (smaller post-tax) in return for £14k of post-tax capital growth. Depends on how good looking the eldest daughter is

South Africa did it during the embargo. The problem is, that it's much more expensive than just buying oil.

Thanks for the link.

I think there'll be YOY rises of around 5-6%.

Given your ambitions and likely poor grade, your choice of accountancy seems wise. I'd look into audit to get the CA qualification and good exposure to a wide range of businesses. However, I'd advise you to leave and set up as soon as you qualify as accountancy will suck the life out of you.

What? The Queen owns Canada, Australia, NZ and the UK? Doesn't sound right to me.

No. I think the 3 year time limit was reasonable and that effectively, that prediction was wrong. Otherwise, I could just say that house prices will double and just have to wait long enough to be proven right. It's a possibility. But I think it is unlikely. If I had known with certainty, then I would have geared up as much as possible to bet on that outcome and become a bazillionaire. Otherwise, if it just seemed like a probable event, then I would have had to weight it against other factors risks (no HPC, inflation, devaluation of sterling etc.) but in the end, the lifestyle choice probably would mean that I would buy anyway.

Depends how you start and what area of interest you have. I started on a 286 learning pascal but quickly realised that I preferred to work on as low a level as possible and programmed in assembly/machine code and explored the internals of the OS as well as direct hardware programming. My interest developed around reverse engineering and quickly got me into some of the 'black arts' and learned some very interesting tricks used by virus programmers and copy protection schemes. My colleagues involved in reverse engineering, security and copy protection are probably the ones who do work in areas where having a small team of 'superstars' is important. I don't work in IT now, but from what I can see, the focus is to have the programming language make things easy and eliminate some classes of bugs, automatic checking to detect bugs, and a strong framework and conventions in place. All geared to being able to harness a large number of commodity programmers. Superstar programmers only really have additional value in certain sectors. For many applications, its cheaper and easier to use commodity programming labour where the key ability is to document and code to standard.