The End Of My Property-Owning Dream

Back in 2000 when I was buying my first (and only) flat, a Japanese friend of mine emailed to say that now I was entering the property owning class that he anticipated that I would not wish to communicate with him being simply an employee, at the time working in a record shop, subsequently when laid off for being too old for that work (at the age of 30) he became a carer.  I know there has always been snobbery in the UK around owning property, but no-one has ever said to me here that I should or should not talk to them because I was or was not an owner of property at the time.  I note this now because finally we have had an offer on the house, probably just in time because I am running out of money to pay the mortgage.  Of course, the offer is less than we paid for the house, by £25,000 (€28,750; US$39,500) and is £15,000 less than the asking price we insisted on (which itself was £15,000 higher than the price the estate agent recommended).  Aside from the slump of 1990-3 the UK, especially southern England, has been used to constantly rising house prices and in general property has been the best investment if you want a decent return on your money.  In fact as I have often noted, house prices have been an obsession in the UK and I can think of no other country where just a simple slowing in the rise of house prices, not even a fall, makes the news broadcasts.  With mass unemployment reappearing and a depression in full bloom, this has already begun coming to an end.

For me, of course, the profitability of owning houses never really turned into a reality.  I owned a flat in London for seven years.  It rose from £80,000 to £130,000 in that time, so I did very well out of it.  The only trouble was, with work taking me away from London on a series of short-term contracts in the Midlands and on the South coast, I was deemed to be running it as a business (I let it out so that I could cover the council tax charged on empty furnished properties) and so I ended up with a £16,000 capital gains tax bill and then, of course, Newham Council, which makes up charges for all kinds of things at a whim, charged me £16,000 as well for work done in the street and to the building which held my flat.  I was compelled to sell the flat far cheaper than the going rate.  It was a two-bedroomed flat but was sold at the price of a one-bedroomed flat, about £20,000 less, partly because the estate agents were in on some deal with buyers (often landlords in the area) and because I was being hassled by my own landlord to move very quickly.  Always remember that however nice estate agents appear to be, they are always playing off the buyers against the sellers.  As a seller, they will never even get you the price that they recommended, expect to lose many £10,000s on that price.  Buyers are also getting very greedy.  When I sold my flat, the buyer, who was being granted constant access to the flat by the estate agent, began demanding various £500 sums for things such as cleaning the flat, something I could get done for less than a tenth of that price.  Clearly informed by the estate agent that I was desperate to move the buyer felt he could twist lots of little bonuses out of me.  The estate agent actually broke the lock to the front door something I had to pay over the odds to have replaced hours before the contracts were exchanged.  I was angered by the buyer's arrogant behaviour and in the end did not pay for the flat to be cleaned; I left the toilet unflushed and a range of food items for the buyer's delectation when he arrived.  It was a small victory, but you can see I was desperate to get something back for all the hassle and lost money.

I suppose I should not complain that I came away with £20,000 profit from the flat.  What was worse was that with the landlord compelling me to move so fast, I had to buy a house (the woman who shared the house with me was sick of renting, but maybe with hindsight we should have done that for a period more) when prices and interest rates were at their highest; more time could have made a huge difference, but I am never lucky that way.  Consequently, of the £20,000 I made on my flat, I will take away about £12,500.  I suppose I should not complain.  I could be facing negative equity meaning that I would still be paying off a loan on a house that I no longer owned.  At least with this deal, I do not get the black mark of repossession against me and all my debts will be cleared.  A lot of people will be far worse off than me.  Of course, I will never own property ever again.  I am now 43 which means that even with the raised retirement age I could not pay off a 25-year mortgage before I retired.

So, after a decade of owning a flat/house, though only a total of four years of actually living in the property I owned, I am back into the rental sector.  Of course, it has worsened since even the bad landlord I experienced back in 2007.  Now you can pay £600 per month to rent a single room in a house.  In addition, you have to go through the humiliation of an extensive selection process.  I am not glamorous, I look peculiar and am told I taught too much.  Like a lot of people looking for a room, I am going to find myself going through fruitless beauty contests.  Landlords/ladies know that people are desperate for housing and so can use this against you.  People renting out property generally think their tenants are slovenly and filthy, no matter how hard they work to keep the place clean.  Rights to be informed of a landlord's inspection are often ignored and you get levied charges like £40 for dust in a drawer or £60 for soap residue in a sink or £400 for the lawn having grown.  I should go into business as one of these cleaners/handypeople who charges such high prices for rectifying these things.

In addition to being once again a tenant, I have also dropped down the social scale even further.  Now, I am a man who has been unemployed for 7 months and will be dependent on housing benefit.  This rules me out from even applying for the bulk of rental property in my area and I am restricted to only those offering 'social housing'.  Housing benefit is falling and will quickly be below the rate necessary for the region in which I live in.  Consequently I will be compelled to move into one of the 'benefit ghettos' that are liable to harden once the new rules of housing benefits really begin to bite.  It seems incredible that twelve months ago that my career seemed to be advancing and I had a house and a stable situation and now that has been stripped of me.  At 43 I am cast on the scrap heap.  My career has halted and I cannot even get manual work because there are too many younger people with the right NVQ to step into those roles.  I suppose pride comes before a fall, but I do feel, that rather than much to do with my efforts, this has been inflicted on me by a government which loves pushing people down the social scale so as to enhance the standing of its people.  I am harangued by the Job Centre to be positive and see some future, but, despite all my efforts, there is no work even in a 250 Km radius, that will take me, I am apparently too much of everything for these employers, too high, too low, too practical, too strategic, too involved, too detached and so on.  Before Christmas I was interviewed for a job and came in as first reserve.  Given unemployment levels it seems unlikely that the winning candidate will turn the post down.  However, I then found out that the funding for the post has not even been approved yet, they were just building up a clutch of potential employees.  I was not even applying for a real job, just simply the opportunity that if a job does appear then I will have a chance to get it.  How much more like disposable batteries can workers become?  'Keep some in the drawer if we need them; chuck those ones out: they're past their use-by date.'

Anyway, I suppose returning to the rental sector will give me issues to post on here, assuming, that is, that I can get internet connection in whatever cramped flat I can get and hear myself think over the noise of screaming neighbours.  What about the woman and nine-year-old boy who have shared my house through the past few years?  Well, with the little money derived from the house sale, they are emigrating to Germany.  With the EU and online sales, small business have a lot more ability to relocate.  Apparently Berlin is desperate for people to rent there and is offering particular breaks.  There are a string of bilingual English-speaking schools there too.  Being an entrepreneur relocating is one thing; an unemployed office manager who does not speak German is something different. 

I am glad that they are getting out of the UK because the future here is going to be incredibly nasty.  As I have noted before people these days often ask: 'why did people not flee from Nazi Germany sooner?' and seem to think that they were naive or foolish.  For my views on this see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/05/respect-difficulties-of-escaping.html  Sitting here in the UK with a new regime, which I trust will never come close to the horrors of Nazi Germany, but certainly seems well on the path to something like the Francoist regime in Spain (1939-75), I can see how hard it is to flee.  You need lots of money and know how you are going to access it in the new country.  You need to be able to speak a foreign language, very well, and to be able to handle all the bureaucracy of the destination country.  You have to try to get some of your belongings out with you.  You have to think about the welfare of your children and how they will be educated when you arrive.  You have to think about what you will do for work.  You have to learn a new set of not only laws, but also customs and expectations.  If you think how challenging a lot of this is, even when you move from town to town in the UK (supplement accent for language in that case), think how many more times it is moving abroad.  I wish I had the ability to go.  Given the damage to UK education that is already beginning, I am glad the boy is getting out.  His mother seems to have paid heed to the warnings I have given about going abroad, see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/09/british-people-dont-be-foolish-in.html and finding a school that was English-speaking, was her first task.  Berlin is very different from the rest of Germany, more international and at the moment welcoming to immigrants from western Europe.  The EU makes things a lot easier for moving around than was the case in the 1930s, but it is still a challenge.

A couple of years ago I wrote on this blog that life does not 'begin at 40' as many have claimed, instead it 'begins to end', see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/09/life-begins-to-end-at-40.html  It is clear now that through bad luck, probably not being assertive enough, and living in particular times, my future is going to be a lot worse than the life I have lived so far.  I have had a brief period owning a house and having a kind of family, the type of lifestyle that the Conservatives are supposed not only to support but to foster.  That period of my life is over.  My one shot at establishing myself in the middle class has gone and now I am an over-aged, over-educated something that will be pushed around by bullying landlords and officials simply because I failed to scrape together enough money to keep a house or said the wrong thing to a question at one of my interviews.

If you have the means to get out of the UK, I advise you to do it now.

In Big Brother Britain Don't Dare Move

I have long said 'Big Brother may be watching, but he's got poor eyesight'. Having worked for the civil service in three different branches I have been aware how dependent it is on human input. So many times do people misread things or transpose digits or drop files down the back of the shelving, that you can often find errors creaping in. My father ended up with three separate tax files because on different occasions when he had contacted the tax office they had got one or more of the digits of his national insurance number wrong or in the wrong order. The problem of such technical error, especially in an increasingly authoritarian regime, was shown sharply in the movie 'Brazil' (1985) in which an insect falls on a typing machine in a sinister 1984-style state and changes the first letter on the name of people to be arrested and a loyal servant of the state is arrested instead. In my own life changing branches at a bank once my middle initial was altered and the last three letters of my surname were left off creating a whole new name associated with my bank account. As we rush headlong towards identity cards in the UK I anticipate many more errors of this kind creaping in and you will find yourself picked up and held for 42 days without charge as your mistyped identity card number happens to be the same as a suspected terrorist. As people such as the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six innocent people wrongly convicted of terrorist activity in the mid-1970s demonstrated it is almost impossible to prove you are not a terrorist.

This post has rather branched off from my intended focuse which was a little more mundane, though for me far more immediate. Despite the fact that I moved house three months ago there still seems to be an incessant amount of people I have to inform about the fact. Partly I imagine that this stems from all the pbobia around identity fraud. This has reached such an extent with online shopping that given I forget all the identity names and passwords (and you are increasingly compelled to have very complex ones missing cases and numerals into the words) that I have abandoned buying online and gone back to doing it over the telephone, which seems to be a retrograde step and certainly more costly for me. Anyway, it took three attempts to get my bank to recognise that I had moved house though ironically they were the ones providing the mortgage for the house I am now living in. I had to change my credit card details separately as though the credit card comes from the bank it is actually supplied by a different company, something I was oblivious to as it has never come up before despite holding the credit card since 1987. Then of course there were the utilities. The fact that gas and electricity comes from a single company reduced one occasion of informing of change of address (and the company then charged me for fuel use at my old address and then refunded most of it generating even more paper) has to be balanced by the fact that in my town we have a separate water company and a sewage company both of which had to be informed. There was council tax and television licence too.

The main problem has come with things connected to the car. When you move you have to have a new insurance certificate which costs more money and they reassess if your new postcode is more hazardous than the previous one. Then I had to change my driving licence and I assumed that as this is handled by the DVLA that they would also change the vehicle registration details and car tax, but of course no, I found today that has to be done separately. Not only does this entail more phonecalls (no companies ever seem to respond to emails) but yet more paperwork as they never simply send you a licence but accompany it with a whole host of pamphlets. I do wonder if there is anything else I have forgotten to change. The electoral register is after us too, but we are loath to change that as we know our former landlord's representative is hunting us down and being public it is one source he will use to try to find us. Oh yes, and I forgot re-registering with a doctor and them wanting you to take out time to have a bloodtests and they are only open for that during office hours Monday to Thursday when I am working 30 miles away.

Of course once the identity cards come in we will have to change them each time we move too, and probably have to go for an interview. As with everything which is being added in British society, the poorer you are and thus the more mobile you are (as you have to seek out employment and housing) the more you are weighed down by such regulations and the cost of delay in changing things. The number of overlapped utility bills I have to pay is ridiculous. No-one seems to conside the burden of getting two bills on gas, electricity, water (they had cancelled the standing order when we moved for some reason then sent out a late payment letter), sewage, telephone (I had forgotten that one though this time it was resolved 5 weeks quicker than the last time I moved) occurring because they now insist you pay in advance for all utilities but they only stop charging you a month after you have left. Heaven help you if you lose one letter or scrap of paper, the authorities are unforgiving. Whilst I have no desire to have all information centralised I just wish bodies reacted as quickly as they expect us to do and not charge us double every time we move house.

The least companies can do is not tell you to inform them of change of address and yet throw away your details each time you move. They should not charge you in advance for utilities anyway and even if they do realise you do not have the capacity for two bills in one month. They should also pay attention when you actually send in change of address details, banks especially as an error in your address now mucks up so much verification of online purchasing. Finally when a company or organisation provides you with more than one service you should not have to change your address separately for each one. For a country which wants greater population, well in fact labour, mobility, its companies and government departments make it a nightmare even to move a mile.

What Annoys Me About ... Dustbin Bags Today

Well, I have finally moved house and was actually online within two days of getting into the new house compared to 6 weeks last time. The issue was then finding the various cables to connect to the system which was achieved yesterday. This is the third time I have 'downsized' so it is always an issue of having boxes of things that you cannot unpack in the new house. This is despite all the local charity shops having another two carloads of my belongings and another load going to the dump.

My biggest gripe in all this moving, and I did most of it myself as removal companies are: a) expensive, b) often unreliable, c) often fully booked up, is the problem with black dustbin bags. Traditionally the British used to move their possessions in old tea chests which were large wooden cubes that could be stacked. However, for most people sometime in the mid-1970s black dustbin bags became the norm. I imagine the rich have special boxes and so on, but for most of us it is a question of putting things into black plastic bags, lugging them to our car and then unloading them at the other end. Up until about two years ago these bags were made of thick black plastic and even when they had been used to carry clothes or ornaments or kitchen utensils they were still generally sound enough to use as dustbin bags. However, people have realised that they are a nightmare when thrown away as they do not biodegrade for centuries. In their place we now have less shiny, biodegradable bags which are great for the environment but totally unfit for purpose. In the past I have never had a dustbin bag split on me while moving house (something you know I do pretty often, I am now in the third house I have lived in 2007) but with these new feeble bags I shed one load on the doorstep of a charity shop, I had actual rubbish pour out a dustbin bag and blow across the street taking me ages to retrieve if I was to avoid upsetting my new neighbours, I had a bag of bedding split dropping it all on to the dirty street. I bought dustbin bags from three different supermarket chains but none was any better than any other. The only solution was to buy what are called DIY bags (from 'Do-It-Yourself') which are as thick as the old dustbin bags but much smaller so needing more of them, and, of course, they are more expensive.

I am all for recycling and reducing the impact on the environment (I have replaced almost every bulb in the new house with the low wattage 'eco' bulbs already), but I also believe in being able to buy things which do the job they are supposed to do and in the UK I can certainly not say that about dustbin bags, even when using them in dustbins, let alone for removals for which they have been in common usage in the UK for the past three decades.