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.

I don't think that an arbitrary age barrier to children or benefits would be of any use, or even desirable. The woman in this story, after all, had her first child at 22, and had just drifted into her situation because it was so so easy. There is not much we can do about the people who are already stuck in the system, but what if benefit eligibility was changed so that they could not be increased except by the occurence of events out of your control? For example, a person on the dole or other income support could not get new house/benefits for getting pregnant, but could get relevant support in the case of an accident that left them disabled. After all, if you are accepting benefits then you are declaring that you are unable to support yourself so why should you be creating dependants? I reckon it woudn't take long to clean up the cycle of dependency if benefits were only available to single childless people and couples who'd had children in solvent and fully committed relationships. I know that it would seem unfair to those with little prospect in life but children it but the reproductively incontinent should be made to think about consequences. The consequences that article seems to show is that if vast swathes of people are absolved from having to put even a moments thought into how their next meal & shelter will be paid for, all their focus will be directed inwards and they will end up depressed and/or wanting to stab the crap out of their neighbours. :angry:

I've always wondered about that saying: how do you get frogs to march?

I don't know why you find this so objectionable; getting help from family in times of serious hardship is exactly what any sensible person should do, and what the welfare state has developed to replace. Housing is the biggest expense that most people have to fund. If TSHTF for us, and the economy is so bad that hubby is unable to get a job where we currently live that will support us, the plan is for me to take the offspring back to live with the parents in a mortgage-free house and make myself useful, whilst he goes find whatever work there is locally or otherwise. What would be the point of having the family half-starving in a bedsit, barely getting by on a minimum wage in order to prove we can 'make it' on our own, when we could be scraping by whilst our nearest & dearest are all together and gaining comfort from one another?

I found the interview (at least the amount that I watched) to be very misleading. They started off by giving a profile of the average ftb which was: 34 years old >£34k salary 16% deposit and then started spouting off about it being easy for couples fitting this profile to be able to afford the average house now that prices had fallen. I don't recall any mention of what multiples, or property types, these ftb's usually purchase for such large sums so late in life, but I'm pretty certian that it's not 3/4 bed houses with enough income and time spare to start a family before the missus' fertility disappears :angry: . The general tone of the discussion did seem to skim over the age and above average wage of these ftbs and started to give the impression that _many_ were this well paid (and I guess no one needs shelter before 34yo) & will be getting back in the market pretty sharpish. I was wondering, when this was on, how many people listened to that ftb profile and thought "that's me forever stuffed then, I'll never have that sort of cash to splash around"? On a side note, did anyone else notice how the chappie who presented the Nationwide figures said: "...this makes house prices about £30k ...(pause)...less than a year ago"? For some reason he felt that cheaper didn't seem to be an appropriate description.

Interesting post HonestEA, I really like hearing what's happening at your coal-face. When you dump the unrealistic vendors, do you know what happens to their properties (e.g. do they go multi-agent at the same high price, take their home off the market etc.)?

So did I! Do you think they're desperate enough to nominate him yet?

LIAR FRAUD MORTGAGE LOANS have I got it right? I've never been good at these word jumble thingies...

This little snippet from shared-equity schemes intrigues me. If you purchase a 50% of a £200k property and its value plummets to £100k in the future, does your rent also reduce from £2750 p.a (£230p.m) to £1373 p.a (£115 p.m)?

What difference would it make to the likelyhood of laundering wether the money was for a property vs a car if they were providing the finance with no more evidence than his say-so? Simply sounds to me like they know they need to be more stringent & selective about handing out the loans, but can't completely shake the old habit of throwing cash at anyone who asks. Very split personality attitude to finance. Shouldn't be too long before all this financial pain makes corporate thinking a little more 'joined-up'.

Was the gay dog problem really that bad on Dartmoor?