La La Land

That is an interesting question, especially as untenanted properties only attract council tax after 6 months of voids. From what I gather, the number of empty properties has been slowly increasing due to their well-known inability/unwillingness to perform adequate maintainence on the houses.

I assume by now you've realised that he's been a member longer than you have, but doesn't post much. This doesn't sound much like a property ramp to me, more like someone who is seriously contemplating prospect of never earning enough in future to fund his life without spending his capital. If he stays renting there is no way he will get benefits until he consumes most of his £140k, and I imagine he needs more than a £12k p.a. job to get by if he has to pay monthly housing costs. The higher paid the job, the harder it is to find. Buying at this point in the cycle may not be the best idea, but if the other option is to whittle down the capital on food & bills to top up a low wage whilst hoping prices fall before you don't have enough left to get a home, then it is something to seriously consider.

Possibly. This boom has resulted in the country being awash with far more one- and two-bedroomed flats than there are households that want to live in them. Once prices have bottomed out, said households are hardly going to pay more than half the price of a house for half a house, if a whole house is easily affordable (and available). So conversion owners might find it's the most profitable way to sell.

Who would have thought that leveraging up for capital gains rather than buying for yield could end so badly? My heart bleeds. No, really, it does...

So are the dogs not legal regardless of what buildings go up in their back yard? Your problem is with the dogs being able to get at your children, so you should be direct and confront this issue and keep at it till the fence is sorted. Anything else just sounds like you be satisfied to punish them in a roundabout way if you don't get what you actually want . After all, what have you gained if you stop focussing on your real problem, get this building (that you care nothing about) removed and the son moves into a flat but leaves the dogs (which you care everything about) in his parents care still with no adequate fencing?

Mmm... you know I was thinking of writing-off my Accountancy qualifications as there is a glut of part-qualifieds and I'm not going to be returning to the workplace for years. But if this debt bubble means that a lot of accountants are going to get struck off due to bankruptcy, there might be a small space in the job market for me to carve out a modest career once my children are at school.

How long has this been the case, and is it guaranteed to be so in the future?

A relationship based on mutual honesty & trust, I see.

I think the only thing the psychologist proved was that girls are more prone to 'scream like a girl' than boys are...

What if it falls on the postman's head?

I know that this is how a lot of people ended up buying, but it has always intrigued me. When I went looking to buy, it was this complete, blanket 'singing from the same hymn sheet' mentality that I met when looking for advice that made me think something was amis. In every other normal aspect of life, you never get a complete consesus like that, especially when you look for advice/opinions on the internet. There was not one property shill that would concede that there was ANY viable reason to rent rather than buy (and even in my ignorance I already knew of 2: [a] not being able to afford it and needing to be highly mobile, although said shills were already touting BTL as a reason why being unable to pay for, or live in, a property was no reason not to buy it). So I just kept looking until I found a dissenting voice to see if the opposite argument was valid & logical, or just a bunch of hockum (ie, if nay-sayers were stating that prices were too high & likely to drop to more affordable levels, I'd look for proof of it & make my decision from there. On the other hand, if the only 'don't buy' reasoning came in the form of 'Lizard Men From The Planet Xebbon Are Arriving Soon To Turn Us Into Pure Energy' then I probably would have been swayed to the HPI camp). I know I'm a bear of little brain, but I can't beilieve that I was the only one who's days at school had provided examples of bubble mentality, with people getting caught up in crazes that sunk without a trace weeks later and leaving nothing to show for their pocket money, so I'm surprised that so many people claimed that this property mania was sustainable & proper and worth putting their life's labour into.

49.5% sterling 49.5% PM's 1% chocolate We're talking tiny amounts here though. The problem with the question, however, is that no one will know who has the best strategy until these financial "interesting times" have played out; then the winner(s) will be the one left with the most (or anything at all - which makes my chocolate holding a bit of a non-starter).

mmm... chocolate...

I would also like to take this opportunity to ask my remaining tenants to vacate my property. It's for your own good.