Adrian Garside

photo credit: dr_tr

Mortgage Solutions article – Mortgage rates to stay at record low until 2014

Citiwire – A sharp hike in interest rates next year

So, sometimes people expect me to have the answer and clearly I can’t with predictions like these coming out within days of each other.

So, I make more personalised recommendations.

Questions like : Can you afford it if interest rates went up to, say 4%?

If the answer is a high pitched ‘yes’ then probably a tracker product can be included in the options.

If the answer is an emphatic ‘No’ then we are talking about fixed rates.

It’s less to do with predictions and more to do with client circumstances – if we predict interest rates are going to stay low, can you afford us to be wrong?

photo credit: ganesha.isisThe UK’s growth figures for the last quarter were published last week and were way better than expected, which is cause for cheer.

However, that does put some upward pressure on interest rates.

The last two Bank of England meetings have had 1 member saying ‘up by 0.25%’ and the other 8 saying ‘hold’. In the Independent this weekend there was an article by the member most likely to be the next to want a rise, but he was very much on the side of ‘wait and see’ – he is happy that we’ve had a quarter of good growth, but not convinced that all our problems are solved.

The predictions amongst the journalists and economists seem to be to expect a rise this year and another in spring next year.

However, over the past 18 months there have been several moments where you’d have expected interest rates to start moving – for instance, inflation has been very high, property prices etc,  but each time the Bank of England have stood firm with a ‘wait and see’ approach.

This is good, and gives the country every chance get as far into recovery as possible without messing it up by increasing rates, however there is a downside – moving interest rates later will usually mean moving them harder – it’s like braking while you are driving – if you spot the problem you can brake gently, but if you suddenly realise you are driving too fast, you need to put the brakes on hard. Actually,  I can carry on that analogy a bit further, if you leave it too late, there may be an accident…

Which is why I am not against 5 year fixed rates at the moment – if there’s going to be an accident, being on a fixed rate is like being on the train, rather than the motorway – very little risk of an accident, but you pay a bit more…

photo credit: ctiemanSo, I have two boys, at least one of them gets very affected by sugar – give him a chocolate bar and you can be sure that he’ll be sat on the stairs within half an hour and frankly neither boy is at risk of falling through the gaps in the pavement.

Breakfast cereals are tricky -  the options always seem to boil down to a choice between Sugar Coated Neon Chocolate Puffs and Bran flavoured sawdust. They’ll tolerate it occassionally, really they are very good. But in reality you can’t expect kids to be eating rabbit pellets happily every day.

But, there is no rule to say that you can’t mix them – a jar mixed with chocopuffs, muesli, all bran and shreddies would go down OK…

Now why didn’t I think of that?

My friends Nicky and Paul Janaway at the Warawee Duck Farm keep pigs as well as ducks.

Not many pigs, just a few breeding sows and a boar called Malcolm. All the pigs have names, but I can’t recall the others.  These pigs have the best life you can imagine for a pig, looked after properly, in a big field and treated almost as pets. They are as organic and well brought up as possible.

Consequently, the meat is like no pork you have ever tasted before. Supermarket pork and Nicky’s pork are worlds apart.

Nicky has 2 pigs going for slaughter in about a month and is selling ‘half a pig’ for £125.

Half a pig is alot. £125 sounds like alot too, but I reckon it’s about the same as you’d pay for pork in the supermarket. However, if you put a 10  oz pork chop under the grill, you get 10 oz on the plate – supermarket stuff all shrinks because of the water that is injected.

Anyway, at the time of writing, she has 3 halves left…e-mail me if you want half, or if two of you can take a half between you.

I’ve seen 2 clients this evening, both to talk about Utility Warehouse Discount Club.

One was a bit doubtful about what I was saying and wanted proof, so she grabbed her phone and broadband bill, which had arrived today and she hadn’t opened. It was £156 for the quarter.

We quickly went through the bill, and worked out that had she been with me for the last quarter he bill would have been £84.

That’s just on the phone, add in the gas and electic and they could be saving £400 a year.

£400 per year.

The other client was saving more on the gas and electric, but they were paying £120pm just for that which seemed like madness, their bill will probably come down to £60pm, but that is unusual to save someone that much on gas and electric. I saved them £15pm on the phone bills too.  Even on estimates, these clients should save £500+ per year.

This is why I do this, I could do it for you too.

Well. If you live in England.

Just contact me.

…may have noticed the the ‘Public Weight Loss Motivator’ has stayed resolutely at ’7lb’s’ lost for a week now.

That’s because last weekend I put many on those lbs back on, gawd knows how, I don’t think I even ate as many lbs of food as the scales registered – sometimes I wonder if atmospheric pressure can affect the way scales work.  Whatever it is, I guess this is why ‘daily weighing’ is discouraged in the weight loss world.

Anyway,  9 days later, I have returned to 7lbs lost again.

I’m getting a bit bored of the food now, I may need to attend a Slimming World class or two to get some more recipe ideas…

Sky News report that BT are putting their Land Line call charges by 10% and putting the line rental up by 50p from the beginning of October.

The cost of connecting a call will rise by 1p and the daytime rate is rising from 5.9p to 6.4p per minute.

They have reassured us all that it’s OK because many customers are on all inclusive packages so won’t pay the extra call costs and they need to do this to raise money – that seems an oxymoron – one the one hand they imply that most bills won’t rise, on the other hand, they must as this is a revenue raising exercise.

It’s no surprise that pretty much every ‘non BT’ telecoms company describes their bills as a ‘percentage cheaper than BT’.

So, if you’d like to see if you can save money by switching, and  having your bills set up in a different way give me a call.

The company I recommend isn’t a supplier – Utility Warehouse Discount Club (UWDC) use the bulk buying power of their membership to negotiate better deals. So, your utilities will be provided by a mainstream supplier, but at a cheaper rate.

They also have the same pricing plan for all their customers, so you won’t be caught in with a ‘fishing rate’ then find it’s expensive again in 6 months, UWDC have no minimum contract and rely on keeping their customers through good pricing and good service and innovative money saving ideas – like ‘the clubhouse‘ and ‘findmethecheapest.co.uk‘.

OK, so you are thinking Gallium can’t be any more fun than Mercury, but I reckon I can convince you.

Mercury is already molten at room temperature, it melts at -38C which for most of us is a bit inconvenient (with a nod to my Canadian readers). Gallium, by contrast melts at a balmy +29C -  just below body temperature.

That means that if we hold a solid bit of Gallium it will melt in our hands – can you imagine that?

Which leads me onto how I know about Gallium – I was just reading a review on a book called “Fun and Intrigue with the Periodic Table”. I know, that sounds improbable, but from the review it sounds excellent – Ican’t wait to read it. Anyway it mentioned a trick involving a disappearing teaspoon – the teaspoon is made from Gallium. (It also explains how a USA senator campaigned for office with blue skin…like one of the Intel men!)

Gallium has the additional benefit of being non toxic, so it is OK to play with it.

Gallium is also readily available on ebay…

I want some. But more likely my boys will get some for Christmas – educational & fun, you see.

photo credit: Osamu IwasakiI have 1406 songs on my ipod.

Presumably when I copied them from CD or bought them from itunes, I thought the effort/cash worthwhile, but in 2 years I have the following stats:

Only 416 have been played.

Of that 416, 169 have been played only once and a further 99 only twice.

11 songs have been played more than 10 times.

One is Logical Song by Supertramp – that is because Zak plays it alot. The rest are probably all mine…hmm, actually, I suspect 2 others at least have got there with help from Finn or Zak. I don’t play Bon Jovi that much.

See comments for the to 11. Post yours if you like!

photo credit: gurmsThe FSA has today issued a consultation paper on Responsible Lending and in it it says that in all cases a lender should obtain proof of income.

That means that self-certification mortgages – where you declare your income and the lenders trusts you can no longer exist.

It also means the end to   mortgages. The FSA agreed that fast track  mortgages were a good thing, the evidence is there – because they are only for high credit score applicants, the arrears levels amongst fast track customers is lower (for most lenders) than in their mainstream lending.

However, if Self Cert is removed completely, fast track becomes open to abuse so the FSA wanted to shut that door too.

The FSA have advised lenders that it wants them to be far more innovative in the ways they prove income. But even so, I’d expect this to cause some people some serious issues.

It’s a consultation paper – not yet rules, there is scope for changes, but I’m not really expecting them, the industry has been lobbying to keep fast track and self cert for 2 years. If the FSA are still following this course, then the consultation paper is probably just issued for protocol reasons and not because they expect to be chnaging direction