Bunch Of Bankers

Sometimes, in a moment of surreal daydreaming, I am transported back to the heady days of property developing, when no one else was doing it, you could stick the price of a dooer-upper on your credit card and the banks had no idea what was going on. Twee little programmes such as ‘Changing Rooms’ and ‘Property Ladder’ urged the nation that, with a lick of paint and a few pot plants, you could polish a turd and sell it on to some poor, unsuspecting first-time buyer, to whom the words back-boiler and dry rot were foreign vocabulary. Oh how twee and naiive these programmes seem to be now, in these days of cut-throat money management, greedy and recaltricent banks and developers who are more interested in making a fast buck than the quality of life of their tenants.
What is more, with the Tories still at the bridge of the rapidly-sinking social ship, we are soon to be confronted by migrant rafts of the over-50’s, waving their newly released pension funds like white flags, hoping to seek refuge in our already over-populated buy-to-let market. Terrified that by the time they retire there will be no social fund left (which is pretty much a reality) should they need it (which they pretty much will), they will all shove their pension funds into buy-to-let, thus causing another bubble, raising prices and making it even more unlikely that a young person will ever own their own home.
But there is some good news…..Lots more people over 50 are having strokes due to obesity and sedentary lifestyles, so hopefully, there will be a simultaneous raft of stroke and heart disease victims needing to release the funds from their newly-purchased buy-to-let investments to fund their medical care. This, of course will cause property prices to plummet, thus giving young people a potential piece of the action. Well, every cloud has a silver lining, I suppose, dystopic and maudlin though the future would seem….
I’m still lucky enough to be encumbered by a handful of my ‘polished turds’ and, on paper at least I’m now worth a bob or to. My mortgage lender (the one who would throw money at me willy nilly 20n years ago) would beg to differ, will not take rental income into account (in spite of the fact that I have consistently optimistic accounts going back over 17 years) and are making me pay back my entire mortgage before Halloween night…..Although I am seeking to re-mortgage elsewhere, my chances of doing so are as slim as the finger I would hope to stick up at my current lender when I hand them back their money on October 31st with no interest.
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