• Welcome, guest!

    This is a forum devoted to discussion of Wolverhampton Wanderers.
    Why not sign up and contribute? Registered members get a fully ad-free experience!

Cost of Living

sycophantia said:
I don't mind council houses being sold off, when we bought our house it was 20,000, the council house we were living in was available for about 7000, it was a good house too, unfortunately my missus didn't want to stay there after a couple of break ins.
The issue was with selling off council house stock was that the profits should have gone back into building more council houses, we all know what happened.
Click to expand...
Our family bought ours for 6k. It’s why I roll my eyes every time my mum mentions 15% interest rates. Talk about pulling the drawbridge up.
 
Last edited:
Presumably a few years after where you can't sell it? Then bam, profit
 
b3h said:
Presumably a few years after where you can't sell it? Then bam, profit
Click to expand...

There will be conditions around the sale, it was discussed on SKS thread around the Angela Rayner CGT issue. It’s one of the reasons she held onto it when she married MR and conveniently planted her brother in. I’m not a gambling man but I’ll take any odds anyone is willing to offer there is no AST for that arrangement and absolutely no tax paid on income received (tax would need to be paid on the market value of his tenancy irrespective of whether monies were actually received or not).

Anyway, that’s been done to death but there are a whole load of other murky ways the discounts are being milked out of council (tax payers) property. The lack of subsequent investment in new builds is a scandal, but some of the stripping of the discounts is pretty outrageous too.
 
Paul said:
That was our thinking, as I was a lorry driver at the time and earning less than £200 a week, it made sense, the fact the interest rate plummeted within twelve months of us taking it out was purely the story of my life :)
Click to expand...
Are you misremembering the timelines a little? Interest rates were high until late 1992?

Bank Rate history and data | Bank of England Database

www.bankofengland.co.uk www.bankofengland.co.uk
 
Late ‘92 locked into 5.75% for 5 years. Marriage and kids was on the horizon so made sense to fix costs to help budget over that time. Don’t recall exactly but pretty sure rates stayed relatively stable over that time and the minor premium was worth it for peace of mind.

While these rate hikes are very painful, there does at least seem order with checks and balances. Mentioned previously the chaos of house prices crashes, negative equity, wild interest rate fluctuations and the abuse of very cheap lending. Got me thinking about 2005 and borrowing cheaply through a SELF-CERTIFICATION mortgage! Can you imagine such a thing now? The whole application was a pack of lies and was effectively a cheap loan for you to do whatever you wanted. If I recall correctly you could borrow huge amounts (you often couldn’t afford) to allow access to the property ladder, or even suggest the extra was for an extension and was shoved into an investment at greater yield elsewhere. People were encouraged to gamble, big time. Jesus Christ, no wonder a lot of people got seriously burned when the credit-crunch was came down the tracks.

I dunno, I get it’s incredibly difficult now but to be honest looking back it feels relatively stable!
 
Last edited:
EpsomWolf said:
Late ‘92 locked into 5.75% for 5 years. Marriage and kids was on the horizon so made sense to fix costs to help budget over that time. Don’t recall exactly but pretty sure rates stayed relatively stable over that time and the minor premium was worth it for peace of mind.

While these rate hikes are very painful, there does at least seem order with checks and balances. Mentioned previously the chaos of house prices crashes, negative equity, wild interest rate fluctuations and the abuse of very cheap lending. Got me thinking about 2005 and borrowing cheaply through a SELF-CERTIFICATION mortgage! Can you imagine such a thing now? The whole application was a pack of lies and was effectively a cheap loan for you to do whatever you wanted. If I recall correctly you could borrow huge amounts (you often couldn’t afford) to allow access to the property ladder, or even suggest the extra was for an extension and was shoved into an investment at greater yield elsewhere. People were encouraged to gamble, big time. Jesus Christ, no wonder a lot of people got seriously burned when the credit-crunch was came down the tracks.

I dunno, I get it’s incredibly difficult now but to be honest looking back it feels relatively stable!
Click to expand...
If you get chance watch The Big Short, the whole thing was like the wild west.
 
I worked for HBOS in the mid 2000s and they got very heavily into sub prime lending. So much blatantly dodgy stuff waved through, a few folk at the top should have gone to jail for it by rights.
 
The S/C mortgage application was a farce. Essentially there was good equity securing the property anyway so the Bank’s advancement would’ve always been recovered in the event of a catastrophic outcome such as my bankruptcy. That was fundamentally the reason they didn’t care what the funds were for, they didn’t give a shit.

To meet their legal obligations after completing the application I had just a single call from someone who said, “To borrow X you need to be earning Y. Can you tell me, do you earn Y?”

That was it, off you go. No evidence, nothing.
 
I had a S/C mortgage in 2003 after my building society gave me an affordability figure I could lend but and an offer for a house that required far less than that. When my purchase fell through and I went for one that cost more (but below their affordability amount) they wouldn’t lend me the full amount so I had to look elsewhere.
IIRC the financial crash of the late 2000s didn’t lead to a large amount of repossessions in the UK especially when compared to previous falls in the market like the 90s. It was more to do with business lending than domestic defaults.
 
Britain's housing market is rotting from within | MoneyWeek
I think I was half right. Repossessions did shoot up but not to the levels of the 90s. I guess what im trying to say is that in the uk, self certifying mortgages didn’t cause greater issues than previous house market crashes.
 
Thing was when the crash came interest rates dropped so the affordability was improved. If you were able to stay put and ride it out you could do quite well.

The poor sods who got mullered were those with little equity to start with who quickly fell into negative equity who then hit problems such as relationships breakdowns etc. It happened to a mate of mine around ‘08/9 and he lost everything. Back in with his mum and dad for a few years and roughly 15 years on and he’s still not able to buy again. That sort of thing happened to a lot of people and it takes some recovering from.
 
Last edited:
Erm, what the fuck was the last 16 years then?
Daily-Express-3.png
 
That’s just a load of Tory-rag crap to make existing home owners feel a Tory government would see them creaming it in for being sat at home doing nothing.

It doesn’t talk about the affects on the housing crisis, what rents are predicted to do in the next four years or how those rises will push first time buyers even further away from the property ladder. Even then 20% over 4 years is only 5% a year which will be around the rate of inflation anyway, plus you could do much better sticking that money elsewhere over that time if that was your thing.

Honestly headlines like that from the likes of the Express are a load of bollocks. Pisses me right off.
 
Can't believe anyone with a modicum of sense reads or takes any notice of the Express, its been a scandal/clickbait rag since inception.
 
Back to rentals, Section 21 etc..

Been talking to one or two people recently and looks like S21 evictions are showing signs of being significantly higher this year than the 49% increase seen in 2023, ahead of the 2024 Landlord reform act and 2025 EPC regs.

Offloaded property has little owner-occupier interest due to higher interest rates/deposits etc, and so cash buyers are capitalising with derisory offers. Interestingly though, there is an explosion of Investment Company interest whereby the properties are bought very cheaply and offered with guaranteed rent yields to investors with liabilities held by the I.C’s. The lower purchase prices and high rents have opened %’s and made that model viable.

Thought it particularly sad to hear the most attractive properties at the moment are ex-council with historically much lower ground rents and service charges. It was always going to be the case a lot of offloaded property was going to find it way into the hands of the big players rather than owner occupiers, but knowing former social housing is targeted says everything about what has gone wrong over the last 40 years or so.

There are some good deals to be had for the very few who are able to break from the trap, but it’s looking very bleak otherwise.
 
I think that our fellow member @Johnny75 predicted that investment companies would come in and sweep up properties.

Does this mean that it's going to cost all of us as investment companies will charge higher rents and taxpayers will pick up the part of the bill through housing benefit?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top