Mortgage payment difficulty advice

gemini24

Hey poet 123, are you my OH and posting without my knowing?? Must say, I only found out today I have a new neighbour in Robbie Williams - god forbid! This should give everyone a fair idea where I live. O/H wanted to go to pub opposite Robbie's huge pile (who knows, I may see him in court one day for possession proceedings - stranger things have been known) in the belief Robbie would be having half a shandy this evening with nothing better to do. I've convinced O/H we also need to keep a tight hold on finances and I certainly don't fancy standing a round for Robbie and hangers on!!

epsilondraconis

I didn't realise Compton Bassett had a high proportion of ghosts and spooky activity. That seems to be RW's main interest at the moment.

I wonder if RW will join Take That now he is settling back in blighty.

poet123

T'is the crop circles that attracted him I expect,oh and the skittle alley.

gemini24

Sorry incogni2 as we have really got off topic now but the Robbie thing is quite huge around our area now. He has, so say, bought a £5K mountain bike in Swindon yesterday - I would imagine the shop isn't used to orders like that every day as Swindon and surrounding County Courts are where I spend a lot of my working time. I just hope, in my haste to get to court on time, I don't knock some pratt wearing a balaclava off his bike as it may well be THE Robbie W!!

incogni2

gemini24 wrote: »

Sorry incogni2 as we have really got off topic now but the Robbie thing is quite huge around our area now.

No problem, the thread has been off-topic since post number 2, as far as I'm concerned. My wife said she bumped into Douglas Hurd whilst standing outside her office on Wednesday. Somehow I don't think that a former foreign secretary has the same cachet as the world's most famous Port Vale fan!

incogni2

The offers were reduced payment of £500 for 3 months or £250 for 6 or extend the loan to 35y £170 reduction.

Sorry, just to be more accurate, we were not actually offered this. No concession amount was suggested. These are my figures because we were told that as soon as the total concession was equal to or exceeded the monthly payment (£1,554.56) then it would be recorded as arrears. So, in order to avoid this, we could also have £300 for 5 months, £375 for 4 months, £750 for 2 months etc. We were told that the initial agreement couldn’t be longer than 6 months. However, we could request a larger deduction, and chose to go into arrears.

incogni2

Working in IT on contract work should pay loads more than 15k.

Please stop obsessing on this particular figure, especially if you have read the rest of the thread. It is the gross profit figure for 2006-2007 and was reduced by capital expenditure in that year. It is also the lowest profit figure, so far, in the 5 years of operation.

As I’ve stated above, the umbrella company route is certainly a possibility. I am still hoping that the poster who originally suggested it will comment more on the insurance situation (again, as detailed elsewhere).

One statement that I would take issue with:

They all invest time and money in ensuring that their skills are kept upto date.

I keep in contact will a number of the contractors I have worked with in the past and the majority are in work. (As I spoke about earlier, if I hadn’t moved out of range, I would be in work too.)

None of their skills are anything like up-to-date. If you want to learn new skills and deal with the significant changes whenever new technologies are released, become an employee. A contractor, largely due to the increased cost, is expected to deliver from day one. Most people I know are still essentially transitioning from C# 1.0 to C# 2.0 (released October 2005), which means that most are still struggling to come to grips with generics. When, if ever, they’ll transition to C# 3.0 (released November 2007), I have no idea. LINQ and lambdas are pretty much a closed book to them right now. These are people in the £400-£500 per day wage bracket, so they must be doing something right – it just isn’t keeping their skill-set fresh! Where would the time come from – especially if they have families?

Again, IT just isn’t the bucket of money it’s made out to be. I’ve got friends in game companies on a permanent crunch (say 16+ hour days) earning a pittance. I’ve got acquaintances at start-ups making essentially nothing, taking a punt on the 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, or 1 in 1000, chance that the product will be hugely successful. The dot com bubble burst a long, long time ago but there are still a surprising number of very able coders working for shares (and living, albeit modestly, on credit cards). For some it really will be the never-never but for others...

incogni2

In the many interstices between jobs I was also contributing to open source and community projects as are (probably) 100s of thousands of others. Some open source contributors are paid to do so, some do so without financial reward in their spare time, others when they are temporarily out of work. A breakdown of these various employment statuses, and their background contribution to the infrastructure most of us use every day, would be illuminating.

A number of you who are contractors, or your friends who are, have a day rate which is partly predicated on the efforts of these people. If you simply use the web then part of your experience is likewise as a direct result of these peoples’ efforts.

If I am out of work for a couple more weeks then I will be releasing my own open source product/project (probably via Codeplex). It is small in scope (since it has been written in 3 months) and reasonably limited in the number of people who will find it useful. However, for those small number of people (it is targeted at an enthusiast marketplace), it will enable them to achieve something which was difficult or impossible before. Yeah, I’m sitting on my ar*e – guilty as charged; but lazy? I see little to justify that claim.

(Again for those who object to tone or phraseology, I am not claiming that there is anything special about anything I personally have done or will ever do. There are umpteen programmers who are doing and will do so much more that it will render my small efforts trivial by comparison. It is just worth remembering sometimes that these people tried to give back something out of the goodness of their little hearts, or due to ideological commitment anyway. By all means, persuade them to eschew their guilty debt-building pleasures but don’t kick them too hard just because they are down.)

Spartacus_Mills

incogni2 wrote: »

Again, IT just isn’t the bucket of money it’s made out to be. I’ve got friends in game companies on a permanent crunch (say 16+ hour days) earning a pittance. I’ve got acquaintances at start-ups making essentially nothing, taking a punt on the 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, or 1 in 1000, chance that the product will be hugely successful. The dot com bubble burst a long, long time ago but there are still a surprising number of very able coders working for shares (and living, albeit modestly, on credit cards). For some it really will be the never-never but for others...

This garbage is all very uninteresting but what are you doing to cut your expenditure to ensure you live within your means ? Are you going to get out and get a job stacking shelves, working in a bar etc etc ? Are you going to continue to sit at home and surf the net with your 2GB a day ? What are you going to do with your situation, let your wife keep you ?

I really think you are a WUM or someone who wants to hear what you want to hear rather than the truth.

If you lose your home how will you watch your beloved Sky then ?

LOL.

incogni2

Hey, I've now posted enough times that I'm no longer a "MoneySaving Newbie", I'm a "Convert". O, the irony!