Preparedness for when

daz278

i think the government are raising the minimum wage not necessarily for the benefit of workers , as big momma says the market will adjust..... but to shift the burden of low wage from government(tax credits) to minimum wage business the government hopes the competitiveness of the market will deter companies from raising prices

moneyistooshorttomention

It's all rather a "ball of string to unravel" as to root causes for many things. Even when looking at the fact that its harder to get the amount of housing available to "go round" and at a reasonable cost if some people own more than one


In theory - I agree with that. In practice - and I cant honestly see where anyone is to keep any savings they have safe against inflation and possible bank bail-ins except in "bricks and mortar" (ie extra "bricks and mortar" to their own homes iyswim). There needs to be a return to nice/rock-solid safe savings accounts with interest rates that pay at least in accordance with inflation - and then many people wont be looking for alternative ways to protect their savings. I cant see it happening somehow:(

Add in all the people who are having to work and/or have part of Their Life in a different location to where their main home is and that could be for a variety of reasons (eg having to commute a long distance for their job and deciding to buy a second place there if they can afford it to avoid that commute) or having been priced out of their own area and deciding to buy a cheapie second place so they can Go Home sometimes (even if they cant afford to live there any more).

It's not all clearcut. There are many shades of grey in between that Black and White set-up and people wondering how on earth to reconcile a conscience on the one hand with protecting their personal finances/their Life on the other hand.

***********

Re building on floodplains - I've seen it happen myself (and got out there and protested about it) and its been useful to read the reasons why developers do this. Obviously, I still disagree with it though - and all the more so in the light of recent flooding.

pineapple

George Monbiot's excellent piece on land management and on how the downstream plebs play second fiddle to vested interests.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/29/deluge-farmers-flood-grouse-moor-drain-land

GreyQueen

The issue about domestic property is that we are trained by our culture to think of it an investment whereas it is nothing of the sort. An investment is something which generates a return. A property you rent out is an investment, a property which you live in is not.

What you home is, if you allow the scales to fall from your eyes, is a long-lasting consumer durable. It had intial construction costs and requires regular infusions of capital in maintenance and refurbishment. All of which is designed to postpone the evil day when it becomes too dilapidated to be refurbished economically and is eventually demolished.

If I run through the homes I've lived in,: the 400 y.o. cottage, 1950s and 1960s council houses, parts of mid-Victorian houses to a 1970s council block, I can easily tally up hundreds of thousands of expenditures in refurbishment and updating. The 1950s council house was a system build which failed and was rebuilt from the ground up. The Victorian houses had been allowed to slip into rack and ruin and divided up into bedsits by the time I lived in them. The total refurbishments of both those Victorian houses took the thick end of half a million. Even the parental ex-council house has required expenditures on replacement heating systems, external doors, windows. It's a sound little house but eventually there will be rewiring and roof work, too.

Shoebox Towers is a seventies symphony in concrete, and it has had a lot of money spent on upgrades, refurbishment and maintenance, and will require a lot more in coming decades.

Britian has a preponderance of very old housing stock and this is something which gives our country character, but it does cause a lot of difficulty as we try to live modern lives in buildings which are 100+ years old. Even things as simple as fitting modern kitchen appliances into pre or post WW2 homes which were never designed for a fridge becomes tiresome.

I deal with a lot of repairs and have to admit a particular loathing of laminate flooring. It is ruined by pretty modest amounts of water, far short of flooding. And thus becomes expensive and wasteful. A lot of modern homes don't even have proper wooden floorboards, having chipboard-type instead. Which turns to soggy weetabix when wetted. One of my relatives currently has an interesting situation with a bathtub perched on a saturated weetabix floor.

:mad: Because no one ever heard of water leaking in a bathroom, right?!

I know people who have had as little as 4 inches of water in their homes for only a few hours, and the remedial works took months. People will need to have fans and dehumidifiers running for weeks to dry their places out. And these were clean water leaks from interior plumbing, not river and rain water.

If I had to take a punt on the longevity of the buildings I have personally lived in, I'd bet that the oldest (farmworkers cottage from early 17th century, with timbers even older) outlasting the twentieth century builds. The Victorian townhouse and the Victorian villa, although at opposite ends of the country, will probably last another 100 years with ease, too.

1Tonsil

Just a quick visit to wish everyone a Happy New Year. We had to cancel our trip to the UK as my husband was diagnosed with Myeloma and had to begin three cycles of chemo immediately here in Greece where we live. His spine is so fragile because of it that he is not allowed to travel anywhere.

He is about to begin his third and last cycle and the medical treatment here has been amazing. The consultant has been wonderful. The good news is that the first two cycles killed off most of the cancer cells and he is very close to remission. He may need the bone reconstructed when he finished the chemo, but we would have to stay on the mainland at the university hospital for that. Hopefully it wont be too soon as they are going to get very heavy snow fall for the next week and very low temperatures which may get as low as minus twenty over the new year celebrations.

We got some of our money back from the flights and the train tickets for the cancelled journeys. We would have been in York and then trying to get to Glasgow by train in the worst of the flooding! We have been following the news and have seen the terrible damage done by the floods. My heart bleeds for those affected.

GreyQueen

(((((((((1Tonsil))))))))))) best wishes to you and your husband for his full and speedy recovery.

moneyistooshorttomention

I've just added that phrase "Weetabix floors" to my vocabulary...

I had them in the bathroom/kitchen extension in my last house and I know exactly what GQ means about them. Add that, when it came to replacing my bath with a shower at one point, I got told that water had been leaking underneath the bath and at some point it would have landed up dangling into the kitchen beneath basically.

Nightmare-ish enough to have a home flooded - but, if its got "Weetabix floors" then :eek:

thriftwizard

The agreement to turn green belt land right along a riverside into brown belt. Then agree to the building of houses, destroying over 100 allotment plots in the mean time. Trees/shrubs/bushes felled in return for concrete over vast swathes of land.

These houses aren't for social housing, they aren't for first time buyers or the likes of the vast majority of people I know. They are for people who can afford to buy big and expensive in an area that is known for it's beauty dictating expensive property prices.

Think I know where you mean, Fuddle... Not to mention the daftness of building 260+ new homes, most of them "executive waterside town houses" on a brownfield site that had known & longstanding flooding problems, where several massive pumps have been & are still running 24/7 just to keep up with the normal through-flow of water. A couple of years ago, when building first started, I talked to the surveyor and site manager (trying to get some guarantees of safety for the riverside trees. Now long gone, alas, along with parts of the bank as their root systems let go) and they were completely perplexed as to where it was all coming from. Apparently the name "Brook Road" hadn't rung any bells with them... :eek:

ivyleaf

Oh 1Tonsil I wondered how you were, as you hadn't posted for a while, and am sorry to hear such news It sounds as if your DH is being very well looked after. Best wishes to you both (((HUGS)))

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

The issue about domestic property is that we are trained by our culture to think of it an investment whereas it is nothing of the sort. An investment is something which generates a return. A property you rent out is an investment, a property which you live in is not.

What you home is, if you allow the scales to fall from your eyes, is a long-lasting consumer durable. It had intial construction costs and requires regular infusions of capital in maintenance and refurbishment. All of which is designed to postpone the evil day when it becomes too dilapidated to be refurbished economically and is eventually demolished.

Exactly housing is a depreciating asset, which requires constant expenditure to maintain its value. The only reason that it is rising in value is that there is a tsunami of cheap money into the property market that keeps everything afloat, and why when there was a credit crunch that property fell 15%.

Property was a very stable asset which rose in line with incomes, until the 1970s. There was a row of 6 houses of sale locally for £600 each in 1962, and they were all built a century or so earlier for a few hundred pounds. So they had risen in line with inflation. Today these have been individually on the market for £300 000 each, yet they have not had much work done on them, apart from the typical electrical upgrades that every property from that era had to undergo. So the only reason they have risen in value is the sheer amount of credit that is now available to fund any such purchase. This is the real reason that the banks were bailed out. As of January 1st if they fail the depositor will pay for the greed of home owners and bankers.