adamUK

Now down to £995k I see. Looks a bit like a commercial development. No thanks.

I like it very similar to you but without the coffee.

Inflation is irrelevant. It's the wage deal you can negotiate that matters. Seriously is there anyone else out there in the private sector (bankers excluded) who's getting inflation-busting pay deals?

I just love the tudor-effect paintwork on the inside of the garage.

I don't spend enough time on HPC to know if this is a repost but I just wouldn't pay to be here... Someone really has a tudor era fetish. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-35743100.html

In Engineering you can earn good money doing: Oil & Gas sector - integrity management - keeping corroding oil rigs from going bang. Now that the regulator's closely watching following Macondo. Nuclear decommissioning - if you can stand the extremely slow pace of work. I am sure some of the ideas behind the safety cases that if they take 4,510 million years to get the thing signed off then the risk will have halved. Still, nice chance to coin it in all funded by HMRC. Chemical manufacturing - less cash than Oil & Gas but still pulling engineering talent from the same pool so rates are okay. There are a few projects going too but most of the things I see are involved with keeping old stuff going rather than putting in new stuff. Hope this helps Adam.

The situation is not as bad as you think. It's bad politics that'll be show stopper here not bad economics... So says the economist this week.

Nice idea apart from our clients have been squeezing our rates ever since the recession (most of them being manuafacturing companies). If I put my rates up by the amount I'd have to then my **** would not hit floor on the way out. This being the fundamental problem between public and private sector. I can only pay what the market will pay. If I try to buck the trend then I'll be out of business.

Interestingly I got a job application from an individidual who works in the Health and Safety Executive. The package that he was on was £10k more than we offer our engineers and that's before the final salary pension. Needless to say, the deal he was on was very good. The bureaucracy was doing this person's head in though.

I've been on the site for, oh, since 2004. It's been an up (then briefly down in 2005) then up, then down kinda existence. Hang in there mate.

I have an offset mortgage with the abbey and it's a very good deal. One thing is that it always makes you feel as though you are in debt as your bank account it always negative - this might be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you deal with debt! The other thing is that you need self discipline as you can put in or remove as much cash as you like. The best thing is that any interest I 'earn' (i.e. offset) is effectively tax-free.

You can say that again. I run a small company with 22 employees and when we do work on a reimbursible basis sometimes people raise eyebrows at the rate. However with pensions to pay (5%+), employer's NI (12.8%), insurance (£20k p.a. including Prof. indemnity), all the guff to ensure we comply with the myriad and ever changing employment laws, business rates (£40k p.a.), plus an office, heating, PCs, software, electricity, waste disposal, maintenance of plant and equipment, UKAS surveillance audits (to maintain our quality accreditation), accountants fees, training and development (including mandatory Heath and Safety stuff), professional subscriptions then you can get someone's salary and double it before you start making a profit. And this is a company with no loans other than then business mortgage and just one 'support staff' who works 3 days a week. Cutting the burden for business should be a high priority of this government. But it won't ever happen. Ever.

Probably. Inflation is high but as we have seen it's external factors (imported goods prices increasing, increasing price of oil/gas) plus government increases in taxes which are keeping it high. There's so much slack in the economy at the moment this'll keep wages down and domestic prices down hence why the MPC aren't too worried about it at the mo. Though they might get worried about stagflation eventually (once the govt. debts have been inflated away first though). This will have an effect on people's house buying potential though, as the essentials become an increasing percentage of take home pay, this leaves less for mortgage payments and the like.

Brilliant!

In the grauniad: Hu Jintao's probabaly going to go around the US and size the place up to see what money he can get during the fire sale. "So Mr Obama, when are you going to pay that $2,000,000,000,000 you owe me?"