CharlieChuck

I finished University in 1992 with a Maths degree, and like other people have said it was almost impossible to get a job. I could have gone on to do teaching, but I really didn't want to. I ended up working in warehouses, packing and occasionally temping in offices, it took until 1995 to get a half decent job. Due to student debts I was unable to even think about getting a house/mortgage, however at the time It was seen as a noose around your neck. Two of my friends' flats got repossessed, and other friends/family were in negative equity for years. Still at least we had decent music then.

From July 2007 figures (page 19), retained profit was 1.75bn, this is £3.53 per share, but. We don't know what losses they have made since July. Whatever the price is below this indciates future losses / risk and how much of the 113bn it will have to write off while collecting it. http://companyinfo.northernrock.co.uk/down...ockEx070725.pdf I agree that shareholders should receive nothing until it is sold or traded out or whatever happens.

Does anyone know how many shares there are? or know how to find that out? If you divide the retained profit by number of shares this would give a value that ignores goodwill etc (as there isn't any goodwill). I can't be bothered to work it out so I'll go for 65p.

They release the information in 2 parts, the gross figure then a few weeks later the breakdown. On their website it doesn't actually say they aren't releasing the breakdown in future months. http://www.cml.org.uk/cml/media/press/1510 The breakdown figures for December were released on 8 Feb, so I guess the January ones will be 8th March or thereabouts. See the Gross Mortgage lending by type of advance excel spreadsheet, goes back to 1970. http://www.cml.org.uk/cml/statistics Overall though if lending last Jan was £26.6 bn and this Jan £26.5bn, with HPI of 5% in the last year then gross lending has fallen relatively by just over 5%.

I haven't looked at MSE for a while, it seems a lot more bearish than it used to be. Theres going to be a lot more of these stories in the coming months.

Whilst were on the subject of spread-betting losses, I opened an account last week and so far I've lost £600. I've learnt important lessons: Make sure you know why you're betting on something, use large enough stop-losses and when you're on a loosing streak, stop, go and do something else, carrying on will usually lead to more losses. I'm limiting myself to loosing £1,000 after that I'm giving up.

It's a bit scary to think that even a safe building society only holds 25% of your money in an easy to liquidate form. This also explains the large amount of good interest rate, fixed term bonds available from various institutions (I saw one from another building society 6.8% for tying up your money for 6 months).

customer Deposits are "shares" in this case 1,901mn, building societies used to call savings accounts share accounts (some probably still do), It's a bit misleading as you think of shares as in stock market shares. The borrowings I presume would be money market borrowings, so their ratio of money market funded mortgages would be about 25%. If savers try to draw out more than 438mn (the liquid assets), they'd be right in the sh1t.

I should point out here my rent is lower than my mortgage was due to me living with my partner now, compared to buying a one bedroomed home. I had about 50% equity. Although the interest has covered my rent, my STR fund has increased because the wages I would have used to pay the mortgage I instead save each month. Obviously I would have been better off selling in June last year, but I saw 2 of my friends lose everything due to the nineties crash, and I was convinced prices were going to crash in 2004.

Doomlord, I sold in 2004 for 120,000. (the clue is in the first line of my post ). I do sort of understand where you're coming from, it depends how much was owed on a mortgage at the time, how much comparable rents are. etc. The more equity you have at the time of the STR the better off you will be. I only need a 20% drop to be level, the interest on my STR fund has covered my rent.

What about interest on the capital? that should pretty much cover the rent. To be honest I was thinking of the house value, rather than living expenses, whether it be paying a mortgage or rent.

Just as an example I str in 2004 for 120,000. house next door to it sold last year for 150,000. Currently I'm down (although I wouldn't like my chances of selling it now). A 35% reduction on 150,000 is 52,500. So, based on these figures price in 2013 could be 97,500.

Like everyone else I thought it was a very good programme, thought FP came across very well. However the only faults were it was too short, concentrated too much on the one company, Morris i think it was. Which could mislead some people to the scale of the problem, thinking it's one rogue BTL company and one dodgy block of flats in london. I almost found myself nearly feeling sorry for the woman who paid £200,000 for a flat which later sold for £75,000. But you can't feel sorry for them, there's only one type of person that spends £200,000 on somewhere they haven't even visited in the hope of getting rich from it. That person is greedy. Hopefully we'll see a lot more of these programmes on telly.

How much money is in these Soverign Wealth Funds we keep hearing about? As a rough guess I reckon a large part of that 250bn will come from them, but under what terms. We are so fcuked.

Thanks for reply. I was trying to find out if fall through's are increasing, especially since credit crunch. A rate of nearly one in every 5 falling through seems high. I gather the ones re-selling in later months are double counted in these figures. It will be interesting to see what happens in february. A sceptic like me would probably say january's figure included a lot of people who needed to move, but who had put off buying until after christmas. Though you could read anything into it. The valuation side is obviously quite complex, what I was getting at is are silly offers being accepted, are there more distressed sellers. Have you started valuing properties less than you would have done this time last year. It's interesting to hear you say a surveyor has valued below 2006 prices, is that specific to flats, or have any houses been valued similarly. p.s. The magic selling triangle image you uploaded looks remarkably similar to a pyramid scheme? http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/ind...ost&id=7444

I've had an EGG card for a few years now, very rarely use it and always pay off the balance. I should think I'll get an email as well.

Interesting, but are these sale agreed figures or actual completions? If sale agreed how many sales have fallen through? Also how does this compare to 2006, 2005. Also (last question honest) how many of the sales were offers under the marketed price? thanks

Like OMG above, we've got a caravan so spend about 4 weeks a year in UK. There are so many places in this country worth visiting, this year we're going to scotland and cornwall. I last went abroad for a holiday 20 years ago, I don't really like flying. Will maybe take the caravan to France in a few years.

It's just a shame that houses sold at auction don't contribute to any House Price Indices. This must be moving the real average price down a lot. Also, is there a chance banks/building societies are rushing to repossess so they can shore up their liquidity? Is it better to have some cash to hoard from the sale along with a write off to profits than keeping the loan still on their books?

Anyone have any idea what the total value of the positions were? The Dax and Cac had massive falls on monday. What sort of percentage did it contribute to this? I'm agreed it does make a good conspiracy theory, but from what I can gather these trades that went through on monday did actually happen. Whether it was a rogue trader or a normal practise with blind eyes being turned I'm not sure, and I don't suppose we'll ever really know. Whether it ultimately was rogue trader or conspiracy, the FED has showed it's hand that it will do all it can to prevent big losses on the DOW. We know what to expect from them over the coming months, but sooner or later it will run out of Interest rate cuts. Waht do they do then?

What is the US rate now? is it 3.5%?

I'm also looking for a change in car, but I think we are yet to see the real bargains. Another six months to a year of redundancies and tightening of credit will see second hand prices drop massively. I'm just hoping my car will last a bit longer without anything major going wrong.

A.Steve have a look at IGLT vs. the Ftse http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=2y&...=&c=%5EFTSE they appear to be mirroring each other. For the past 6 months or so I've been switching my ISA (it's not a huge amount of money) between gilts and FTse tracker selling ftse at 6500 or thereabouts and buying gilts, then reselling the gilts when it falls enough. The current drop has caught me out a bit though.

Do the basket of goods get "adjusted" for next months figures? I know it's done on an annual basis. It will be interesting to see what the weightings get adjusted to.

If all the banks are after a finite amount of our savings to prop up balance sheets, then I suppose they will have to pay more to get our money. However as The Generation Game says, We know the base rate will be falling next year, inflation is on the way up, so in reality savers will probably end up the same as now.