Igor's house would be full of shite him and his mad mates found in skips or pinched on nights out, and then he'd spend all night trying to get you to open the fridge because they keep a mannequin head in it.
Yeah, obviously very accurate for when I was about 21, but I'm too busy sneering to be as wacky and random these days. Besides, I don't need to fill my mother's house with cliched esoteric tat when I can just bore my mates to tears by making them watch weird youtube videos instead.
When I briefly made an effort with the post-graduate society in Norwich the greebo lad was obsessed with 'pranks'. He seemed to have quite a high turnover of housemates as well weirdly enough.
What kind of pranks? Me and one of my mates got quite into doing pranks over skype for a while (you could pay about a fiver for a month and get unlimited calls to British and American landlines and mobiles). The best was when we phoned up Durham student radio, I put on a gruff cockney accent and played the "dodgy celebrity agent", and told them I had Louis T (documentary man) on the line ready for his interview. Despite the fact that obviously Mr Theroux wouldn't be going on student radio for an interview, and the fact that they obviously hadn't been expecting it, as I progressively got more gruff and exasperated they started to buy it.
My mate took over, with his really quite bad L.T. impression, and they proceeded to spend about 2 hours talking to him. My mate got bored about an hour in, and started to deliberately say weird shit and amped up his accent to increasingly cartoonish levels, but we found one of the poor dickhead presenters had sent a gushing tweet to Louis thanking him for the experience afterwards.
Oh, and the time we phoned up Lance Storm's cellphone and pitched a tag team with an investigative journalist gimmick based on woodward and bernstein.
I hate myself.
Edgy.
It was all high-level stuff like putting grease/polish on door knobs and tampering with condiments. He also used to like telling people about his coffee addiction. His coffee problem. He couldn't go without it. Is that why your teeth are so disgu... He just loved it mate. Twenty cups a day at least.
Jesus. I want to say how much of a fucking freak that guy is, but we phoned up the Sun's newsdesk in the run up to the 2015 general election and spent 10 minutes bigging up our "major scoop which could totally destroy Labour's campaign", then finally revealed that our sources had informed us that "Ken Livingstone is an asylum seeker", so he's almost certainly operating on a higher level than we did.
Zany.
I've a question about paint:
Got a tub of Valspar V700 to paint a very light grey onto a wall. The wall is currently white. Two coats should do nicely.
In the same room the radiator pipes have been boxed in with plywood. I want to paint this wood the same colour as the wall. If I get the wood equivalent of the paint in the same light grey colour, will it be the same colour as the wall after the usual two coats? Or will it need a trillion coats? Or must I paint it white first?
I'm a twit
That's a bit stupid, no?Help to buy ISA
First-time buyers will be able to open a Help to Buy ISA to save towards a deposit. If you save in this type of account, you could be entitled to a tax-free bonus payment from government when you buy a home. The maximum bonus paid for each account is £3000 and you can only open one account.
If you have a partner, your partner can open his or her own account and will also be entitled to the bonus payment, meaning that a couple could get a bonus payment of £6000 to put towards the cost of their first home. The bonus will be paid once the sale completes, so while the bonus payment can be used to clear some of the money you owe on the property, it cannot be used to boost your deposit.
Solicitors get around that, you just need to disclose it up front.
Anyone have much experience with / knowledge of shared ownership? It seems from my research to be the only way I can avoid pouring my money into a rent bonfire forever, as on my salary a full mortgage in the south east is basically unattainable.
I know someone who did it, and they said it was a total disaster, and would never do it again. Their house lost value after they bought it, but they were responsible for 100% of the losses. Let's say the house is bought for £200k, but only sells a few years later for £190k.
They only received £90k, while the co-owner got their £100k back. So despite the house losing 5% of its value, they lost 10% of their investment (plus all the bullshit fees on top).
The proper answer, in my opinion, is to move to a cheaper area if you really can't afford to buy.
I have some money for a deposit, but even for a 1 bed flat here (or anywhere that does not involve completely uprooting my life including job) I'm looking at minimum 250,000, and I'm not getting a full mortgage for that without doubling my salary.
Also bear in mind that I'm unlikely to have children/a family so will probably actually live in it a long time rather than needing to upscale, and I did wonder if it might be the best of the universally terrible options available.
There's apparently a load of stringent conditions on those too where you could very easily lose the whole property. They sound like a bit of a scam.
You can get those help to buy mortgages where you essentially borrow 30% of the value and have to pay it back in a few years. One of my friends did that to buy a house worth about £190k and his financial position isn't amazing.
Sorry, it was 20%. Buy within London you can get up to 40%.
In the socialist utopia that is Finland, the government backs your loan up to 180k. You need to have 10% of the value yourself though. The banks will give you the rest. Total interest is a 0,65 at the moment as well. So yeah, maybe move here.
Brexit has fucked Jimmy's one chance.
In Geneva, the shortest mortgage is 100 years. Unless you’re absolutely loaded, you will never own a home. Completely unrelatedly, it means the banks can list your house as assets on their books.
Lol, I have £50,000 in deposit but I might as well spend the lot on cheese for all the use it is.
Buy a house with me, I'm in the same boat.
Weren't houses about 90p in Ireland after the arse fell out of the market?
A more extreme version of here then really. Or you're basically all London.
That's seriously good going to be fair. Is that purely down to living at home? If you were to move out and rent would you still be able to save, all be it much slower?
Sounds like you're in a good place financially none the less.
Alternatively move to hull, or Teeside and buy a mansion.
That isn't a good place financially down here, unless, as I say, you want to spend it all on cheese. It just means that if my car breaks down I can fix it without worrying, and that sort of thing. If I moved out and rented somewhere that wasn't a dive (I'm 30, I've done the student bit) then at best I could save a couple of hundred a month, maybe even double figures or a loss in a lot of months. I could carry on living at home until I'm 40 and then be in a very good position to buy, but who wants to do that?
The answer is to double my earnings, but that obviously takes time.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 25-01-2019 at 08:34 PM.
For what it's worth my long term financial plan is to win the euromillions.
I've been very fortunate in my salary rising c 65% since I started in sept 2012, but that's just the industry I'm in.
Suppose it's a balance between independence (renting) with financial freedom but little hope of owning, vs independence too late in life.
You got any mortgage advisor mates? Are "new build" developments a thing down there? Up here they're huge and that's the step a lot of folk jump in.
Sounds like a tough situation. Team excel pro/con listing is required.
EDIT: I'll take a PS4 though, given you're flush.
It doesn't really help that my parents (being arch-boomers) are fixated on the idea that I must buy asap and don't shut up about it, which makes me want to rent asap so I don't have to listen to their bullshit anymore.
It's all in stocks and shares ISAs anyway so I can't get at it without faffing, your PS4 will have to wait.
My parents are the same. They're pestering me to buy a house.
I pointed out the fucking enormous stamp duty id have to pay, and huge interest rate I'd be on and they simmered down a bit.
I'd love to have been in the age where you could buy your house in cash like my grandparents did, or have a mortgage that wasn't financial suicide like my parents. Our generation is up against the wall.
My parents got on the ladder buying a house in north London for £50,000 in 1982. That's £182,500 in today's money. I've just looked at the same area now and a 2 bed house is around 550-600.
Being, ahem, single doesn't really help either.
Your four million pound house has what then fifteen bedrooms?
My parents bought their first house in 1981 for about a fiver, but, bearing in mind that they could only borrow not a lot, and that they were then paying seventeen per cent interest on it, over the potential lifetime of the loan it would actually cost more than buying now. The HOUSING CRISIS is only really in about four cities, albeit the ones with the jobs and that in.
My mortgage is £562 for a three bed house, was paying £700 rent for a one bed flat. We looked into shared ownership for a while but as we didn't have kids and our earnings were higher than the average people looking at shared ownership we were told it was extremely unlikely.
My mum and dad bought our quite nice but quite pokey 3 bed terrace for £47k in 1997, and it's now worth roughly 200k.
Bit shit for my mum that because my useless dad fucked off/went to prison she's had to pay the mortgage single-handedly since 1998, especially as she's had to drag me up and was earning less than 13k/year until about 2013 (and no more than 20k ever). However, she finished paying it off about 6 months ago and now owns it outright. What a legend.
Being mortgage free and owning your home will be such a good feeling.
If I went balls deep in over payments I reckon I could have this flat paid off by 2021 or early 2022 but that would require selling some shares and dumping all my savings into it as I go. Not happening.
This flat has been financial suicide though, it's lost so much value because of the oil crisis a few years ago.
Houses and flats in London scare the hell out of me. The market seems to fluctuate wildly. You could conceivably either make an enormous profit or end up in huge negative equity over the period of a couple of years.
Eeesh. Yeah. I have a mate in quite similar circumstances to you Jim - he's 30, single, earns slightly MORE than you, and has only just been able to afford to get a mortgage here. 135k for his place, which is like my mum's pokey but nice 3 bed terrace, except pokier and less nice.
I could just about do it for 135k I think (hence why the shared ownership option seems attractive). The cheapest dive one bed flats here are about 230-250k, and you're looking 280-300 for the new build one bed flats that spring up ten a penny and they clearly slightly struggle to offload. House, lol, dream on.
My mate (married 1 kid) recently bought a 2 bed run down old disaster of a house which had had the same tramp living in it since 1972 and had woodchip and rising damp everywhere, and I think that cost him about £380,000.
I've started paying more attention to house prices and mortgages and having a look around at what I could afford in Belfast. I could afford mortgage payments grand (and should be in an even better position to do so later in the year when I either get promoted and a pay rise or go elsewhere for more money) but what fucks me over is not having a deposit. Don't even need that much of a deposit here but I'm not great at saving and it's gonna take a while.
Also don't know if I really want to commit to staying in Belfast. Still think about returning to London quite often but that's probably not a financially sensible idea.
Go to a help to buy show and speak to one of the specialist h2b mortgage advisors. There are loads of options and with your deposit you should hopefully find somewhere.
When I was looking at shared ownership a 300k place was coming out at just under £1000 p/m with a 20k deposit.
If your rent/mortgage was low enough that you could still save a considerable amount then you'd know eventually you'd be able to own it outright.