John Doe

5% is about the long term average. Rates are going to be ultra low for some time yet. Plenty of time to save a deposit, or build up the equity, and then fix for the long term. Oh and I see BDEV is 94p now!

This really is utter nonsense. For a start, first time buyers (who now also need a 10% deposit for their 1st property) will not have to fork out ever increasing amounts to buy their second home, as they used to have to before, as the price of that second home isn't shooting up all the time. This is a good thing. The 10% deposit for the 2nd home will come from the FTB's paying down their mortgage on the 1st property, as it should be. Again, this is a good thing. (Financial torture , who writes this c**p?)

Er yes, so actually her monthly payments will be going DOWN quite significantly (From 6.9% to 4.8%). So she can use the extra she will now be saving, to make overpayments, bringing her out of NE rapidly. (it's only 7K FFS). I see she also got rid of a 12k debt too, so she obviously wasnt struggling to pay the mortgage at 6.9%. Hardly the actions of a SHEEPLE, I mean, where is the 4x4? No doubt, in a house in that price range, it would probably be costing her far more to rent too. So what's the problem exactly?

Off the top of my head, I would say about 6 to 7% (but of course you can fix for 10 years for much less than that). Thanks, all going well, new-un should be here by May

It's always cheaper to buy, everyone knows that Dr B. Oh sorry, missed that in the earlier posty, congratulations! We just found out we have a second on the way! Arghhhhh!

That's right, and there will be more printing before that happens.

Know what you mean though. the BiL is paying £1700 per month for a 1 bed down there. Wierd for us up in Glasgow, you can get a mansion for that sort of money here And a 10 year fix is only slightly more at the moment. Put that against rising rents for the next 10 years, and the case for buying becomes stronger still.

I was under the impression that haliwide are based upon mortgage approvals, i.e. transactions to come. Land Reg (actual finalised transactions) are a few months old.

Yes, same by us. It really is strange with all the fear around. Flight to (assumed) safety? QE? Ultra low rates for years to come?

Up they go again +1.2% MoM Boom cruise speed? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15617271

Know what you mean. We STR'd twice, and several rented places (due to one thing and another including floods, owners selling etc). My little-un had lived in 5 different places by age 4.

It's a beatiful day outside and YOY house prices back in positive territory (according to NW) http://www.bbc.co.uk...siness-15528740 And UK Q3 GDP +0.5% Happy days (Oh except for that little Greece thing )

Mortgage approvals down. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15519934 World on edge of new recession. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15519699 Never been a better time to buy buy buy!

Not to bad, all things considered.

Yes I get that feeling sometimes too. I guess some refer to real, as priced in real money (what they would call gold), but also, even if you put the equivalent cash pile in the bank over those 6 years, you would have got on average about 5% per annum (more it you locked in the long term 7% deals in 2007). On that basis alone, the house (if still the same price nominal) would have decreased by 30% real from your pot of money. (Actually, about 24% if working on £130k in the pot to buy the £100k house as the 100k house is now ~£76k relative to your original pot). A similar calculation can be made assuming the interest you would have paid over the same period had you had a £100k mortgage, instead of £100k cash.

Dear Dr, my qualifications are not in question here, it is you that is trying to promote new theories based upon a few dots on a line and "seeing a pattern". Even my (Russel group) undergrads could point out the flaws in your theory. (There's another hint BTW ) Your partner will have told you this also, but I assume you kept banging on and on about it so that now she probably just can’t be bothered to argue with you any more, and is telling you what you want to hear (with the BIG BIG caveat that more data is required, so at least she keeps her professional integrity), as it is very clear that you are incapable of having your “theories” scrutinised and/or, dare I say, criticised. Your partner, if honest, would also have told you that, strictly speaking, without a full data set, the standard deviation approach is flawed. I.e with earthquakes numbers per year, you do not have an absolute deviation, and you don't even know if all have been recorded. You would have to, at the very least, use s sample STD approach. Moreover, because the data covers such a wide range, and many of the points aren’t even near the mean, the standard deviation is, by definition, large, which indicates you should expect wild swings in the data. (see for example the drop in quakes to the 2nd std). By the way, statistically, 95% of all the years quakes will fit within two standard deviations of the average, which according to the USGS, is 18 per year. (Yes the data is up to 2010, but with a couple more per year since then, but that would only move the average slightly, and would mean all your data is still well within the std devs). But heh, don’t take my word for it, write it up and submit a paper to a respected journal as I suggested. (and yes, a good paper might take a few days hard work, but if you are so sure, it would be worth it, would it not?) OK? Oh and I see you are now changing your theory from "major earth changes" and a "breakthrough in human thinking" based on 30 years data, to earthquake cycles over 37 years, just like some of the experts (who you were recently rubbishing) have hypothesised . Did you realise you were out of your depth and decided to change your tune perhaps? Well it's a start I suppose.

Because, as you know, real includes inflation, nominal doesn't. Wages have risen maybe 5 or 10% over the period, less for many, but real inflation (not fiddled RPI/CPI) for many has been far higher for many years. So taking these figures into account, a house up here that is nominal 10%-15% below peak nominal, is ~ 25% down real, even after accounting for higher wages. Plenty of examples around the country of these falls, but in London, maybe not. London's strange

Cheers WB, although to be fair, it's mainly statistical mechanics that I use nowadays. However, without giving too much away, random walk effects (including drunkard's, i.e time & space) are prevalent in many of our groups research, as you would expect . I’ll try and listen to the link. PS the debate continues over on the volcanoes thread.

Good, they should double or trebble it while they are at it. Second home owners have destroyed many costal areas, they are like ghost towns "out of season".

OK

But Dr B, the charts you have studied over the years have full data sets and are driven by human decisions. Quakes etc are not. Do you really think that you are the first person to look at data like this and to think you see patterns? Do you really think the researchers might not have thought of this, might not have checked it? Of course you don't, as to think otherwise would surely be the actions of a person whose arrogance extended beyond belief, wouldn't it. Day 1 “Oh look there’s a swallow! Woohoo! It’s summer! “ Next day.....rain “sorry guys, false alarm” Next day “look there’s a swallow! Woohoo! It’s summer!” Next day.....rain “I know, I know, sorry again, false alarm” Next day “look there’s a swallow! Bet it rains tomorrow!” If the next few show increasing numbers of bigger quakes, it could indeed start to become significant statistically, (but even then it wouldn't necessarily mean the years after that wouldn't have less and less). Look at the hurricane data, to the untrained eye, it implied things had changed 2004-2005. They had not. However, it's one hell of a leap to equate a year or two with a couple more quakes than normal to major earth-change, and even more to link it to a "breakthrough in Thinking". What exactly do you mean by this? Is it a movement, like the hippies in the 60's, or an evolutionary leap?

Could we keep this to just one thread perhaps? No it's not, it's (according to the experts) just a couple of years of near normal activity. How is reading the research of experts sticking your head in the sand? Interesting that you have to resort to name calling and casting assertions on my profession. is this the normal behaviour of a "so-called" financial expert And if you want to keep your family 100% safe from tsunami and quakes, dont live next to the sea in a quake zone. Simple. Exactly, you are starting to get the picture. Er no, the experts stated it. However, it doesn't take a genius to realise one swallow does not a summer make. (See next comment) So what? Deaths from Atlantic hurricanes were far higher in 2004 and 2005 than many years previous, or any since. People all ran around saying things had changed and this was so significant. Guess what. It wasn't. You of all people (a so-called financial expert ) should understand that past performance is no indication of future performance. What negative comments, I've just questioned your questionable methods and flawed analysis and added facts to the debate. Do you see that as negative? Really? Is this why all the real experts think that there is no significance in the current number of quakes? Are they really all wrong and you are right? Wow that's really some confidence you have. Or perhaps, it is just possible that you are wrong and mistakenly seeing patterns where none exist and in fact those that have spent their lives studying these things might know a little more about it than you? More insults, hmmm, interesting. "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." Mahatma Gandhi Not ignoring data Dr B, just knowing how to treat it

Obviously not dear Dr. I spend my life seeking truth. Perhaps it's just that I am trained to avoid the trap of seeing patterns that fit my theories, when in fact those patterns don't exist. The old classic "I know better". Do you look at the data more closely than the US Geological Survey that has been studying these things for many many years? Of course not. I note that you had been very careful with your words here, which I'm certain is because your partner told you there is nowhere near as much data as would be required for this type of analysis. As such, the analysis is irrelevant. This is most easily seen by looking at the years 85 to 89 during which (according to your "beyond two Standard Deviations away from the Mean" theory meaning Earth is undergoing Major Earth Changes), the earth stopped changing Another point is that, according to the National Earthquake Information Centre, the average number of big quakes per year is 18, not 14. Time for a new graph perhaps? http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/5-Earthquake-Myths-132190993.html So, all in all, far from being a "disrupter", I would say I was actually more of a truth seeker than you. As such, can we have less of the name calling when we don't agree? There really is no need for it. I couldn't possibly comment

I remember the early days on HPC. Some posters saying a shock would be needed for real falls. Everyone ridiculed them, then a few years later (after another 30% rise in prices) the crises hit, and they were proved correct. Of course, they had flattened during 2007, but they only dropped significantly after the world ended up on the edge of the financial abyss. So I think you're right, it needs a major shock (like last time) before (if) any worthwhile falls will be seen in nominal terms across the board. In real terms they are still falling and are actually about 25 to 30% down from peak at the moment (more in some places, less in others).

You mean on mortgages? If so, actually nearly all SVR's have gone up, while the best fixed rates (available to the select few with big fat deposits) have only fallen by about 1% at most. Trackers are still about the same.