Energy Price Guarantee No Longer 2 years just 6 months at current level

mmmmikey

....so coming back to the question of the EPG, if the chancellor is going to set out a costed plan in his November statement, is that going to give us any clues as to what the new scheme might look like?

Alnat1

Anyone up for asking their mum-in-law to move in with them? 

ariarnia

Alnat1 said:

Anyone up for asking their mum-in-law to move in with them? 

if she lived here i'd never have to cook again but might put on 4 stone. which might cut the heating bill as we'd all be more insulated!

BooJewels

Alnat1 said:

Anyone up for asking their mum-in-law to move in with them? 

I  . . .  have . . .  no  . . . . words . . . 

wittynamegoeshere

My suggestion was what two families I know have done - they have pooled their money, bought a big house but the oldies live in a separate building in the garden, a long way from the house.  In both cases, further away than the unknown random neighbours would be in any suburban house.

I wouldn't even consider having parents from either side living in our house, my blood's normally boiling after a few hours with hers.  Besides, they never took their parents in so there's no reason to feel compelled.

deano2099

ariarnia said:

that's the problem you seem to be missing.

when you are in a larger house (in the mil's case a three bed semi) worth around £130-160k and you can't afford to downsize to a more 'affordable' and efficient smaller house because of the local market conditions and limitations like accessibility. not every larger house is worth half a million pounds and its the more run down houses that will be the most expensive to heat (because insulation and home improvements are expensive and grant eligibility is often based on claiming some form of benifits). 

if you have a large house that needs a lot of work and is inefficient to heat then its very possible all you will be able to afford is a small house or flat that needs a lot of work and is ineffeicnt to heat and you still wont have the money to have the work done to it. AND you have the extra cost of moving and if moving away from the area paying for help that your family currently provides. 

More efficient houses are going to be more expensive. Of course they are. They're better. 

This is my point: if you're not doing it by choice, when you "downsize" you're going to be moving somewhere cheaper and hence worse. You're doing it because you can no longer afford the place you are currently living in. There is no magic solution where you can keep the same standard of living. There can't be. The only solution is to reduce your standard of living. That's an awful position to be in, and I do sympathise. The magic bullet where you get to "downsize", free up money for the bills and still have the same standard of living... it doesn't exist.

Your objection to every suggestion in this thread has basically been "can't do that as it would make her standard of living worse". But that's literally the trade-off here. You can't afford to live your current life at your current standard, so you reduce it. That's the bare economic fact of it. It's not that I'm not sympathetic, god knows I've campaigned for Labour multiple times, I hate that this is how the country works with the very fibre of my being. But it's what people have voted for time and time again. It's where we are. It's the challenge people of every age are facing right now.

If there's literally no way around it, if you've looked at everything, and if every option works out more expensive that the current property (because of costs of moving, and costs of help and so on) then I believe you. But that means she is living in the cheapest possible place currently and can not afford it. And that means she's in poverty. And that's really scary, and again, I sympathise. And realistically that means it's now going to fall on you to provide the support needed. Again, I don't like that, I don't think it's fair, but it's the government we have and voted for.

But it's also true that she isn't "most people" and in terms of the more general discussion here, "downsizing" is an option for many. The reason we're discussing a few specific cases here are because posters bought them up. But the solutions are often going to tend more towards the general than the specific. This isn't a thread where you or someone else has opened it saying "this is my situation, please help".

ariarnia

deano2099 said:

ariarnia said:

that's the problem you seem to be missing.

when you are in a larger house (in the mil's case a three bed semi) worth around £130-160k and you can't afford to downsize to a more 'affordable' and efficient smaller house because of the local market conditions and limitations like accessibility. not every larger house is worth half a million pounds and its the more run down houses that will be the most expensive to heat (because insulation and home improvements are expensive and grant eligibility is often based on claiming some form of benifits). 

if you have a large house that needs a lot of work and is inefficient to heat then its very possible all you will be able to afford is a small house or flat that needs a lot of work and is ineffeicnt to heat and you still wont have the money to have the work done to it. AND you have the extra cost of moving and if moving away from the area paying for help that your family currently provides. 

More efficient houses are going to be more expensive. Of course they are. They're better. 

This is my point: if you're not doing it by choice, when you "downsize" you're going to be moving somewhere cheaper and hence worse. You're doing it because you can no longer afford the place you are currently living in. There is no magic solution where you can keep the same standard of living. There can't be. The only solution is to reduce your standard of living. That's an awful position to be in, and I do sympathise. The magic bullet where you get to "downsize", free up money for the bills and still have the same standard of living... it doesn't exist.

Your objection to every suggestion in this thread has basically been "can't do that as it would make her standard of living worse". But that's literally the trade-off here. You can't afford to live your current life at your current standard, so you reduce it. That's the bare economic fact of it. It's not that I'm not sympathetic, god knows I've campaigned for Labour multiple times, I hate that this is how the country works with the very fibre of my being. But it's what people have voted for time and time again. It's where we are. It's the challenge people of every age are facing right now.

If there's literally no way around it, if you've looked at everything, and if every option works out more expensive that the current property (because of costs of moving, and costs of help and so on) then I believe you. But that means she is living in the cheapest possible place currently and can not afford it. And that means she's in poverty. And that's really scary, and again, I sympathise. And realistically that means it's now going to fall on you to provide the support needed. Again, I don't like that, I don't think it's fair, but it's the government we have and voted for.

But it's also true that she isn't "most people" and in terms of the more general discussion here, "downsizing" is an option for many. The reason we're discussing a few specific cases here are because posters bought them up. But the solutions are often going to tend more towards the general than the specific. This isn't a thread where you or someone else has opened it saying "this is my situation, please help".

i'm not really interested in starting this conversation again (and i get the feeling i'm not alone in that) but theres a wealth of difference between your current post and the attitude of some of the earlier posts. 

i'm not interested in the politics and never have been. this tangent started because people were talking about who deserved help/to be seen as in need and who didn't and it went down the predictable route of judging if people were the 'deserving poor' or not based on if they were in houses that were too big for them and expensive to heat.

the reality is and always will be more complicated and while some solutions might exist it is not fussy or unreasonable or defeatist to say that lots of solutions take time, upfront money, and might not always be suitable for individuals and that means people might be in difficult situations next winter because of there circumstances. hence why my stance has always been any assessment of need or help must be based on the situation someone is in at the time they need help. not how they got there or if they've 'tried hard enough' to help themselves first. they need help and any available help should be prioritised or rationed or assessed based on that fact first. moving them out of that situation can happen at the same time or after. not instead of. 

any assessment based on how 'deserving' someone is of help leads to the lazy stereotypes and sweeping generalisations that people arent trying hard enough that have been in so many posts here. that is the point i was making and the point that i think you and others have kept missing.  

FreeBear

Alnat1 said: Anyone up for asking their mum-in-law to move in with them? 

Don't have an in-laws to take in (thankfully)... Got me a new lodger though. Having a second pair of hands has been a great help when wallpapering the stairwell.

wittynamegoeshere

deano2099 said:

ariarnia said:

that's the problem you seem to be missing.

when you are in a larger house (in the mil's case a three bed semi) worth around £130-160k and you can't afford to downsize to a more 'affordable' and efficient smaller house because of the local market conditions and limitations like accessibility. not every larger house is worth half a million pounds and its the more run down houses that will be the most expensive to heat (because insulation and home improvements are expensive and grant eligibility is often based on claiming some form of benifits). 

if you have a large house that needs a lot of work and is inefficient to heat then its very possible all you will be able to afford is a small house or flat that needs a lot of work and is ineffeicnt to heat and you still wont have the money to have the work done to it. AND you have the extra cost of moving and if moving away from the area paying for help that your family currently provides. 

More efficient houses are going to be more expensive. Of course they are. They're better. 

From my experience of house-buying 3 years ago, I found that there was actually very little premium for energy efficiency.

I saw lots of houses with solid walls (i.e. no cavity), which are always going to be expensive to heat and difficult or impossible to improve, but they are not sold for a lower price and seem to find buyers OK.  Perhaps this will change over time as people become more aware of this sort of thing.  In fact a lot of these solid wall houses are old, so are also the prettiest and often premium priced.  In lots of other countries they smash down old buildings and replace them with new efficient ones, we pay a fortune for them and lovingly restore them.

There's definitely a newbuild premium, even for 10-20 year old houses.  Also people will pay £1000s extra for shiny worktops that probably cost £500 to buy, and grey paint and a vase of twigs seem to also add £1000s to the price.

We are obsessed about the number of bedrooms in this country.  I've looked in an estate agent's window in Spain or Greece (forget which), and their headline figure is the number of square metres, which seems like a much more sensible place to start thinking.  They do state the number of bedrooms, but only in the details below.  I think this is probably how most of the world works, we just have a weird bedroom obsession here.  I suppose it's key if you have loads of kids, but it's the only thing that you'll know from a glance and there can be a vast difference in size, efficiency and lots of other factors between two 2-bed homes.

mmmmikey

wittynamegoeshere said:

From my experience of house-buying 3 years ago, I found that there was actually very little premium for energy efficiency.

That was 3 years ago, before energy prices rocketed and heating costs became the focus of headline news day in, day out. I don't think you can make that assumption now, it seems to me very likely anyone moving now will ask what the heating costs are like as part of the purchasing process. In an environment where people are downsizing to save money it's likely to be a major factor and will almost certainly make more energy efficiency houses more valuable.

And the forecasts are that (a) prices are likely to fall over the short term making the financial incentive to downsize less (b) if the general economic situation is worse then there will be more demand for small houses and less demand for large houses closing the gap further (c) inflation is likely to push up moving costs e.g. legal fees, removal services, costs associated with new furnishings, etc.. So there are a number of factors that make the economics of moving very different to when you moved 3 years ago.

From what you've said, it sounds like your move 3 years ago was well thought through and made on the basis of sound reasoning. And of course, there will be some people who could benefit in the same way. But as I've said above, you moved 3 years ago and things are different now, and as others have pointed out there are lots of reasons (both financial and non-financial) why moving isn't going to work for others.

If, as I believe you do from some of your more recent posts, you accept that everyone's circumstances are different, this just becomes a debate about how many people could benefit and how many couldn't. The experiences across this thread suggests there are very different opinions on that.