Garages, beach huts, woods etc

PasturesNew

patman99 wrote: »

Don't write-off woods as an investment.
Woods consist of trees. These can be cut and sold for timber and new trees planted.

That's a whole new skillset to learn - and further investment.

To cut down trees you need to understand what you've got and how - and find buyers and transport .... and pay for it all.

Lot of hassle/investment/risk potential.

padington

patman99 wrote: »

Don't write-off woods as an investment.
Woods consist of trees. These can be cut and sold for timber and new trees planted.

I burn a lot of wood, got a wood burner in the front room, dining room and a fire basket in the garden so use a lot of wood. However I rarely pay for it. With the amount of building work or deliveries in London, its so easy to find free off cuts or pallets to keep me going.

However would love to own a wood, free paintballing would be great and so would building a secret ewok village ...

salimali39

A beach hut sold for £153,000 the other week!!!! :eek:

padington

salimali39 wrote: »

A beach hut sold for £153,000 the other week!!!! :eek:

You can get them for 15k in hove, you have to be a local though.

Possibly a very insightful example of what could happen to property prices should we developed a protectionist non free maket housing market.

westernpromise

Self-driving cars, like robot slaves, fusion electricity too cheap to meter, maglev railways and holidays on the moon, strike me as another of those ideas that excites nerds no end but never actually happens or even gets nearer.

The idea that Mrs. Promise is going to clean her car out after every use, or that there won't be snob value perpetually attached to your car as there has been for the last 120 years, is simply laughable.

But while we're on cars, personalised number plates have been an astonishingly good investment. My father paid £7k for a plate in 1993 that's now worth £30k (at least, that's the bid I've seen for it, and it's borne out by the asking prices for similar plates online). That's a 6.5% compound return for 23 years on something that occupies no space, needn't be insured, and can't be stolen or damaged, unlike the car it sits on. There's no income from it but neither is there any CGT. GOK why people pay this kind of money but they do.

Conrad

Always wanted to own a wood, I love em, but when I last looked into there seemed to be quite a bit of potential for on-going costs and hassles, such as keeping the boundary in order, particularly fencing and over-hanging branches.


Just too many unknowns the last time I checked.


Mind you I've had an email this morning from a tenant, large leak in a flat of mine, and he also suspects a possible break-in attempt, oh joy.

Generali

westernpromise wrote: »

Self-driving cars, like robot slaves, fusion electricity too cheap to meter, maglev railways and holidays on the moon, strike me as another of those ideas that excites nerds no end but never actually happens or even gets nearer.

The idea that Mrs. Promise is going to clean her car out after every use, or that there won't be snob value perpetually attached to your car as there has been for the last 120 years, is simply laughable.

But while we're on cars, personalised number plates have been an astonishingly good investment. My father paid £7k for a plate in 1993 that's now worth £30k (at least, that's the bid I've seen for it, and it's borne out by the asking prices for similar plates online). That's a 6.5% compound return for 23 years on something that occupies no space, needn't be insured, and can't be stolen or damaged, unlike the car it sits on. There's no income from it but neither is there any CGT. GOK why people pay this kind of money but they do.

Just because something has been the case for a while doesn't make it so in future.

The idea that money could be anything other than specie would have been laughable well within the timeframe you discuss yet today we openly laugh at 'goldbugs'.

When my father was a child, well after WW2, you could identify a man's profession by his hat. These days the only Englishmen to wear hats are spotty youths and Test cricketers.

I'm sure that if/when Self-driving cars come in someone will come up with an expensive version. There are likely to be strong network effects preventing too much stratification of the service in much the same way as there isn't a Facebook for posh people.

Generali

Conrad wrote: »

Always wanted to own a wood, I love em, but when I last looked into there seemed to be quite a bit of potential for on-going costs and hassles, such as keeping the boundary in order, particularly fencing and over-hanging branches.


Just too many unknowns the last time I checked.


Mind you I've had an email this morning from a tenant, large leak in a flat of mine, and he also suspects a possible break-in attempt, oh joy.

It's hard to see what you get out of owning a wood too unless you're a shooter.

westernpromise

Generali wrote: »

Just because something has been the case for a while doesn't make it so in future.

That's why I said number plates have been a good investment.

Thing is, I can remember Tomorrow's World on TV and how it was full of guff about cuboid sausages, flying cars, self-shining shoes, and much else that was never going to happen. I am pretty sure they ran more than one story about the return of airships too. Meanwhile it had nothing to say about the internet. Bill Gates didn't mention the internet either in his 1994(!) book The Road Ahead. Peak oil looked pretty plausible too but it looks a bit sick today.

Thinking back further still, The Island of Dr. Moreau was an 1890s take on GM animals, except back then it was surgery rather than genes that did the modification. In 1905 torpedoes were going to make surface warships obsolete. And so on.

I'm not a huge fan of futurology because it makes no testable predictions - the futurologist who cocks it all up* will always say that factor X came along and that's why Y didn't happen - but broadly speaking if people have been saying X is about to happen, and have been saying that for 50 or 100 years, then it's probably not about to happen.

* The best futurologist of them all was Philip K. D!ck, who accurately predicted that in general, technology will always get subverted towards crushingly trivial or frivolous ends. So in one story, time travel is used to send service engineers back in time to repair your faulty swibble before it breaks. In another, mass extinction of animals makes them valuable, and spawns a whole industry that creates artificial life simply so you can impress the neighbours with your fake sheep. In the same way, we have Facebook and Tinder.

Conrad

westernpromise wrote: »

Self-driving cars, like robot slaves


.

Do you watch BBC4 documentaries?


Loads of examples from history of things dismissed that became reality, including the motor car, at a time when people said they could see no case they would ever become popular, after all a horse was faster. Brian Cox and Jim Alkalilli have documented case after case of progress being dismissed.


Same with trains, electricity, washing machines, mobile phones, home computers and even radio ('the devils instrument') and telephones dismissed out of hand as a novelty, and later a detrimental nuisance as they would 'stop people conversing face to face and lead to social breakdown'). The first undersea cable connecting the UK to the US was resisted and roundly condemned, yet changed the world.


You've seen the films about Enigma, right? At every turn the boffins were frustrated and hampered by 'knowing' others. Same with radar.


Gary Numan was ridiculed by the music press in 1979/80, they dismissed electronic music as an unwelcome passing fad.


No offence but you're falling into this age old trap of dismissing change, but if you watched those documentaries you would be taken aback that people dismissed all the things you now take for granted.


I cant wait for an electric car - people will quite soon laugh at the 'funny' cars with exhaust pipes.