horse

Not so bad, ....so long as the "kids" don't mind living in a rabbit hutch until their 60's waiting for their parents to snuff it!

"For every $100,000 your house has appreciated your son or daughter is now another $100,000 in debt" And for 2.4 children, your average family is 100,000 -240,000 = 140,000 worse off! http://news.goldseek.com/TrendInvestor/1192633320.php

Errr, you can do this anyway with a half decent accountant! Typical Labour rip off, giving us something we already have! http://www.avoidinginheritancetax.com/how_it_works.htm

Nice to see our housing minister feathering her own nest! http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/a...d=1770&ct=5

Great choice! I lived out there for 2 years after getting hacked off with the UK. My only regret is coming back to the UK in 2005. The Thai people are very genuine and polite and I always felt much safer out there than I did in the UK. As a previous poster mentioned the Thai people do work hard, for relatively low wages, but Thai word for "work" is the same word they use for "party" and they do enjoy themselves when they are at work!

So when he's sold off all this land and property to try to patch the countries finances together long enough for him to get the top job, I assume we the taxpayer will forever be paying out millions to rent this property back?

Your arguement assumes big inflation = big pay rises. In the good old days when we used to make stuff, this would work. But we are living in a global economy now and the remaining employers who haven't moved production / outsourced to Asia aren't going to tolerate big YoY pay increases. There is a huge imbalance of wealth between the west and developing countries and this is set to change over the next 20years, they are going to get richer and we are going to get poorer.

Nope, you need more. Just got 4% gross rise, haven't seen a payslip yet, but worked out my take home will increase by 3.2% (due to tax bandings) depending on your tax situation, hgh rate etc. you would probably need 5-5.5% for your take home to increase by 4.4% I'm sure 99% of people don't consider this when negotiating a rise!

Open an account with Nationwide and use a debit card over there to withdraw cash. They use the interbank rate with no commission.

I think brokers like goldmoney have to report transactions? Haven't really looked into spreadbetting, how would you place a bet that would track gold prices?

Supose I bought 1 Kg of gold at todays current price of circa £11/gram. (£11,000) 1 gram of gold would buy me 11 loaves of bread assuming bread is £1 / loaf. Fast forward a few years and assume we have undergone a period of runaway inflation. Bread is now £50 a loaf! However 1 gram of gold will still buy me 11 loaves of bread. (1gram of gold in now £550 / gram). My kilo of gold bought for £11,000 is now worth £550,000! Gordon want to charge me capital gains tax on my £539,000 "profit" At 40% allowing for the 8K allowance this would be a bill of around £212,400. But in reality I have made zero profit, the gold I bought a few years ago is still worth exactly what I paid for it ie 11,000 loaves of bread. However Gordon would have effectively stolen 4248 loaves of bread. i.e. my £11,000 investment is now worth £6752 in real terms Is there anyway to prevent being robbed by the govt. in this way? I don't really want to start buying gold coins on ebay and storing them under my mattress

Interesting and alarming link on the RPI con.... http://www.galmarley.com/framesets/fs_rpi_inflation.htm The author may be biased, owning a gold dealing site, but still very interesting . There are some other good articles on this site too. My first post - I hope posting links is ok?