Frank Hovis
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Posts posted by Frank Hovis
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In last week’s Budget, Chancellor George Osborne said the bond would pay ‘market leading rates’. The rates will be set in the autumn, but the indicative rates are 2.24 per cent after tax (2.8 per cent before) for one year and 3.2 per cent (4 per cent) for three years. These rates are far higher than those on offer from banks and building societies.
Halifax, one of the largest savings banks, pays 1.12 per cent (1.45 per cent) for one year and 1.4 per cent (1.75 per cent) for three years. So £10,000 in an NS&I one-year bond could yield £224 - double the amount with the Halifax.
The NS&I rates look good in the light of the Bank of England’s thinking on interest rates, which could start to rise slowly next year, edging up to 2 per cent in early 2017 and staying between 2 per cent and 3 per cent until 2020.
Anna Bowes, from data analysts Savingschampion, says: ‘The Pensioner Bond is likely to be snapped up. It could get the competitive juices of the other savings providers flowing.’
Kevin Mountford, head of savings at comparison site Moneysupermarket.com, says: ‘Banks and building societies will have to react if they see sizeable chunks of money leaving them. It could act as a trigger for them to put up rates.’
Index-linked bonds were initially only available to over 65s, hence they were dubbed "granny bonds".
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I did respond to somebody who said that in the long run property only ever goes up; that so do baked beans, it's called inflation.
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That's simply not true. £9000 > £0 is an indisputable fact.
So much of the criticism of tuition fees sounds like nothing more than the well-off, entitled classes throwing their toys out of the pram because the state is no longer providing them with subsidies. Who cares if 45% of student loans are written off. The wealthy in society are still paying the remaining 55% which they previously received as a handout. The system isn't perfect, but it's still better than the state providing an open cheque book with no individual contribution expected.
University entrance was on merit rather than on parents' wealth back in the 70s and 80s, and if your parents were wealthy then you didn't get an income grant. The "handout" was free tuition because it was believed that educating your most academic children beyond the age of 18 was something in which it was worth the country investing.
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Mmm, looking tricky. The salary rules out staying in a Premier Inn or somesuch and the cheaper further out bits don't have 24 hour public transport as I knwo too well - a few expensive cab rides when I lived there!).
Couple of thoughts:
YMCA if there is one - when I started work one of the girls lived in a YMCA at Regents Park - best address by a mile!
Affordable (means 80% of market rent) rented flat from a housing association - people think you need to be destitute / on the register for ages to get these but not so. Get on the register and then keep an eye on Gumtree where many are listed with a three / four day window for bids, I know lots of people with zero qualifying points get these because they're the only bidder.
And get a bike.
It will be hard on that money in London but you need to (re) start somewhere.
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The mass expansion of university education has worked in its way though hasn't it?
- Youth unemployment and the bill for it is massively down as people have been convinced that borrowing to support themselves between the ages of 18-21 is the thing to do.
- They have also been convinced to borrow to fund a mass expansion of academic jobs and administrator salaries.
Why do you need to bring back national service to deal with unemployed youth when they will boorow to pay their own beenfit and employ lots of lecturers.
Economically it's a winner.
The losers are the students:
- Those who were bright enough to go before now find themselves with a £60k debt at graduation rather than a £1k overdraft.
- Those who weren't bright enough to go before find themsleves with a degree that makes them no more employable than they were at 18 plus they have a £60k debt
Still, as since Blair took office and ably continued by Cameron / Osborne making life increasingly hard and debt-ridden for young adults seems to be standard government policy.
- Youth unemployment and the bill for it is massively down as people have been convinced that borrowing to support themselves between the ages of 18-21 is the thing to do.
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come on ladies and gentlemen, are you going to let this veritable bargain of a home slip past you.... it is still for sale and 2 months have passed
Ooh ooh! Could I have correctly called the top? That's the first time I've called it and did so because whilst other house listings have made me think "over-priced" that was the first one that actually made me laugh.
A house that I wouldn't want to live in for enough money to give anybody an immediate retirement. Have the plebs sordida finally smelt their collective £3.50 lattes and woken up?
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Hopefully a big sell off will get rolling soon, that is needed to shake out all the idiots who gambled and lost.
Well yes, but I question the "soon". It won't be this year and will only start next IMO. I thought I was buying 2015 but that's now gone back to 2016. I need to call it ahead as I've got lots of three year / five year stuff so I have to start taking some of that as it matures rather than rolling it.
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Forewarned is forearmed and it is in my opinion that the BoE should grab the bull by the horns and start to raise the base rate NOW or at least before the USofA do so. This should boost confidence in sterling and lessen the interest rate shock coming.
I'd like to see 2-2.5% getting there in 0.5% increments. (Most new trackers are at 2-3% above base now anyway).
I detect a teensy weensy problem with that plan, no nothing to do with Max Clifford but:
Lurch himself:
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It's irrelevant.
So few properties actually have debt now - and so few of the ones that do are on trackers - I can't see it making a lot of difference.
It'll be quite depressing to watch the few poor bstards, who scraped together 5% and had to take the worst possible lending rate available, get mugged again as they are the only ones it'll impact.
Boomers will just buy the assets up with cash and rent them back.
Do what? There isn't that sort of personal cash laying around, and everybody I know with a house has a mortgage on it. And it's notjust trackers, SVRs will clearly move as well.
The difference certainly is made:
- to buyers no more easily-affordable mortgages on offer, renting is much cheaper, etc.
- to mortgage payers - I only knwo a minority who have been paying down, most have been seeing it as free money. Suddenly the house becomes a major cost, forget any thought of upsizing, consider downsizing
It will make a vast difference.
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Nuke 'em!
(I jest)
Long-term heavy sanctions until, like Afghanistan but for different reasons, the pain becomes not worth the prize and a change of regieme says "enough".
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Interest rises are inevitable.
The question is how soon and how much.
I would be surprised if there is not a US rate rise within 2015 which means the BoE will follow as it has no choice.
The historical pattern is that once interest rate rises start then they rise quicker and steeper then people expect because their purpose, to choke off inflation bubbles, doesn't work when footling around with quarter percent blips.
These will then drop back down to a "normal" level (anywhere from 3% - 6% depending who you believe) but a rapid "spike" is highly likely.
IMO the US will delay their rise as much as they can, so November 2015 is my guess.
If you're looking at buying a house (as I am) the spike will be unmistakable and then you can start assembling your funds or deposit, but the bottom will last for years and there will be some price stickiness at first so give it at least six months post-spike before seriously looking, ignore the "don't miss the boat" rhetoric of the VIs, that boat will be beached for at least a couple of years.
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I used it, I thought it was pretty good and actually got my current job through it.
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So if you buy a field and subsequently get CRL lodged on it, is it un-giveawayable? Like you could be stuck with it forever waiting for the church to bill you?
or is there a way to absolve youself from ownership like give it up and write it off?
This came up with timeshares. You draw up a proper legal contract and sell it to a tramp, give him £20 for his trouble and then it's legally his and they have no recourse to you.
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This is why i'am in favor of mansion tax, this does not hurt the wealthy but the hurts those that work or are poorer. If they could run councils for the past 22 years using council tax then they should be able to do it now, guess the banks made more of a social mess that what people may think.
A major proportion of council income has always come from central government, that has been severely cut by Pickles so cuts and council tax increases are needed to replace it.
It's ironic that EP applied that 2% barrier when he is the direct cause of councils needing to raise more revenue.
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Except that it's payable by the occupant. In the case of rented places that's the tenant not the landlord. Rising council tax will have no effect on landlords or their property prices.
It will be their cost in the event of voids, which will be a further drive to get places rented out quickly so providing downward pressure on rents.
So it will have an effect on landlords.
And it will have an effect on their property prices because it will be downward pressure on all property prices and there is nothing magical about the price of rented properties.
I do wonder about the fatalism of some people on here
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Mansion tax 'could trigger huge crash in property prices': Owners' lobby group claim that 'economically illiterate' levy is just politics of envy
New lobby group launched by multi-millionaires in West End restaurant
They claim property prices will fall and hope to overturn public opinion
Experts claim homeowners will be hit with £50,000 bill to live at home
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I don't understand why there should be any discount. It should be 100% for everyone, based on house-size / number of bedrooms / value-tier ect.
There's people on the forum who pay rent and pay full-rate council tax, whilst they have non-working wives, caring for their children... paying full rate council tax.
Other's who have partners unable to work (sickness).
So you use half the resources of fire & rescue, libraries, parks, leisure facilities, planning system, traffic management and road safety,
cemeteries, consumer protection ect ect. Of course you do.
I agree, it's a property tax. Everybody on here applauded (quite rightly) the removal of the discount for second home owners despite their unquestionably using a fraction of the services of a permanent resident.
So as we all think that the property is over-valued then an increase in the tax upon it to make it a less attractive asset to hold would be a good idea.
The way that central government (Pickles) has massively cut its support to councils has yet to really show up in council tax rises as they've been able to make cuts (I would say cutting the fat, but that's not what they've been doing - cutting public toilets, sports centres, libraries is more the mark - things people actually want) but those easy cuts are stopping and the central government payment is still reducing.
This means several years of sustained above-inflation council tax increases.
IMO this will be enough to tip us back to where we last were in the mid 90s - houses are seen as a cash-draining liability. And the prices will plummet.
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I just changed my TDI to a Toyota petrol. More REVs = Better! 18mpg difference, but I do <10k.
I have promised myself a petrol V8 or at the very least a V6 should I get my annual mileage sub 10k
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The weird thing is Lidl isn't that cheap, usually the range is one item, where as a big supermarket can cater for a wider price range right down to super budget lines at around 10p.
I can go into Tesco and fill a trolley for a tenner, go to Lidl and I come out with a carrier bag, sucked in by the deal of the week which has usually run out anyway. As for deep end of day discounting like a loaf of bread for 10p, Lidl just don't do it.
Also Lidl/Aldi veg and fruit isn't that fresh... get a triolley load of veg for 5p an item at the Tesco discount counter and it will last longer than in date stuff from Aldi/Lidl guaranteed.
Thank God for Tesco and being able to buy a weeks shopping for next to nothing.
That works if you are determinedly shopping for the absolute cheapest without overmuch concern for quality. I find the Tesco budget stuff poor, you may pay slightly more for the same at Aldi / Lidl (way less than branded stuff) but it is much better.
I can buy a cheap loaf at Lidl for about 60p, which is ok, or pay a £1 and get a really nice one. It's a shop in which you very much get what you pay for. Aldi won loads of top quality awards last Christmas and Lidl picked up a few.
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'People will say “well you’ve made a lot of money on the house over the years, why not pay the tax bill”
I am one of those people Paul.
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The picture really says it all.
The detail is more involved and technical and there if you want it. US rate rises to come earlier than expected?
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The huge bills for the knackered DPF filters on diesels bought by people who don't do motorway work offset the savings ;-)
As has been mentioned before diesels are there for high mileages. With a diesel I save about £1,700 a year in fuel compared to my previous reasonably efficient petrol car. That pays for a hell of a lot of maintenance.
If I was doing about 10k miles per year I'd go back to a petrol, I prefer the engine response.
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Presumably this doesn't prevent you using the land for the purpose for which you bought it? So not entirely worthless. Even if you're a philanthropist and bought it for some reason with no economic value to you, that should stand(?)
When you've paid £21k for something that you could have got for free then "worthless" is a pretty apt description.
A friend bought a small field because he, well, just fancied owning a small field. There wasn't any purpose intended for the land or speculative gain, he just fancied having it, colouring in that section of the old tithe map that it was shown on, and walking around it occasionally with friends having said "come and see my field". He never did anything with it or intended to.
It seemed a reasoanable purchase to me in that it was unlikely to lose much value so if he got stuck at some point then he could sell it. It's easy to spend another £21k on a car so for a vanity purchase this was slightly more sensible.
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Unusual conclusion:
The fact that millions of people are at the mercy of bank interest rates in relation to a basic human need—housing—is socially criminal. The solution to this looming crisis requires a major redistribution of wealth, away from the rich to working people, and the nationalisation of the major construction firms under democratic workers’ control.Letting house prices fall is a rather neater solution, and buying houses now should carry a governement health warning (rather than a scheme to help people enburden themselves with unrepayable debt).
Student Loan Writes Off Approach 45% Of Value
in House prices and the economy
Posted
Agree with you SpectrumFX, when young(ish) people I know are trying to pick up temporary work the women go for nursery jobs and the blokes security. The vast majority of blokes can think of nothing worse than spending the day looking after twenty toddlers. There's nothing cultural in that, it's not worries about what your mates might think, just a natural aversion to doing it whereas the women see it as an ok job.