Second the synology, I have been very pleased with mine, and as said above, you rarely see a poor review of one.

Another good review, I’m getting more and more tempted!

Not really doom and gloom, just giving the OP a balanced view to all of those saying he should rent it out.

Property has gone up, on average, over the past 50 years, but I bet if you spoke to somebody who bought in 2007 and sold in 2011, or somebody who bought in 89 and sold in 95, they wouldn’t consider property such a great ‘investment’. Remember that your 50 years of past performance isn’t an indication of future performance. You only need to look at Japan after their property bubble to see an alternative view of what can happen.

Good luck with your decision.

Also, don’t forget that if you decide to rent, you will be responsible for costs such as buildings insurance, annual gas checks, cost of heating and council tax when you don’t have tenants….

Looking at it the other way, taking 40k off your mortgage would probably save you at least £150/month, plus improve your ltv when/if you come to renew your mortgage deal. With mortgage rates on the up, it would be best to minimise any existing liabilities that you have.

Sell it. The housing market is still in bubble territory by any historic measure, and all of the fundamentals point towards further falls in prices. Don’t spend 15k (or more likely 30k as has been pointed out above), on something which is only going to depreciate over the next few years. Sell up, take the money, and avoid the stress!

I’ve got a Gaggia Classic, and I’m pretty happy with it, but I do find that I get a bit of a bitter taste. I’m using Illy preground coffee, and get a good crema, but I’m not sure why it tastes so bitter. Any tips?

I do have a grinder, but it doesn’t grind fine enough for espresso I find – it takes much longer to pour a shot with the Illy ground coffee, than with beans that I grind myself.

TJ is right – the agent should have sorted all of this for you. Are you still with Oulsnam? They really are a terrible agent – get rid of them at the first opportunity.

One point I found, is that if you can used wired connections between NAS and router, then this helped speed up delay between changing songs etc. My squeezebox is also connected to the router via LAN cable, instead of using the wifi, just to make it as reliable as possible.

You may want to put your NAS hidden away from your router, so the LAN over mains power devices can be a simple solution that allows you to use cables instead of wifi.

I have a synology NAS that lets me use my squeezebox without a pc – and I can control it from my Android phone. So the concept of using a NAS with a squeezebox without a pc is fine – it is just a case of if you can get it to work with that particular NAS.

I’m sure if you google that particular model, you will be able to find out if you can get squeezebox server to run on it. In fact, this suggests that you can. Not bad for the price!

Cannock (follow the dog) was brilliant this afternoon. Very dry in most places, one or two muddy patches. No snow. It was also empty!

Good stuff, thanks drac!

You can always rely on stw, its better than google!

Cool, just to be 100% sure then (I’m not a frequent iPad user), photos in the camera roll will include photos taken with the iPad, images downloaded from the web, AND images transferred onto the iPad, that were taken on a different camera ?

Cheers for your help!

Drac – I’ve had a quick look at reviews on youtube, and all the examples show transferring of files from the camera roll. If you install it, could you just double check that a photo you have downloaded / taken with a different camera than the iPad camera can be transferred, and let me know?

Cheers

I plugged in the USB, and it did recognise it as a camera. As far as I could see though, it would only let me see the photos taken using the iPad camera. The photos I’m after (wedding photos), were taken with a separate camera and transferred onto the iPad.

Cheers for all the responses so far – Drac, that photosync app looks promising.

Cheers

Clubber – so if I connect using iTunes, will it let me download from iPad to PC, even though it is my pc, and not his?

Also, is there any issue with the iPad being registered to more than one pc?

What would using a cloud involve doing?

I’m really surprised that such a simple task can be a pain in the backside to be honest!

Been a better forum since the ban imo

Offer them £52,000 :-)

Have you got the Property Bee toolbar for Firefox? If the house is listed on rightmove, you can see any changes to the listing, including price drops. This can help give an insight into how likely they are to accept an offer -for example if they have reduced the price recently, they may be in the ‘need to drop the price to get a sale’ mindset.

What the kingisdead said.

Inflation is a funny one too, it is a common misconception that inflation erodes away debt. It is only wage inflation that erodes debt, which is something that we arent seeing much of as a nation.

Price inflation without wage inflation just means that people end up with less money to spend on mortgages, putting another downward pressure on house prices.

There was a mention about the property ladder earlier on. This is just a term pushed out by the media and vested interests, to try and scare people about ‘missing the boat’

As an example. I want to buy a house for £200,000. But I can’t afford it, so I settle for a £100,000 house to get me on the ladder and then allow me to trade up. In a rising market, 2 years later, prices may have gone up 10%. So my house is now worth £110,000 and the house I really wanted all along is now £220,000. So the difference between the 2 houses has increased from £100,000 to £110,000. This doesn’t feel like I’m climbing a ladder to me.

And in a falling market – you are better off just renting as you don’t expose any of your deposit to being eroded by falling prices, and you don’t have the other associated costs that come with buying – solicitors, surveys, maintenance, etc. The longer you wait in a falling market, you end up with a bigger deposit, so you end up with a smaller mortgage at the end of it.

It is scientifically proven that Maccy d’s purchased at airports contain zero calories.

You won’t burn the torque converter with your foot on the brake in D with the engine idling.

If you have put a lot of energy into the brakes and sit with your foot on the brakes at rest, then you can run the risk of warping your discs as the brakes cool.

Some modern autos will have auto hold function which applies the brakes and cancels creep, so you can release the brakes whilst in D, and the car will remain still until you press the accelerator. Although if you’ve got a torque converter auto I’m not sure they have that function, DCT’s can though. Edit, looks like pembo has just confirmed that torque converter autos do have auto hold.

The other pain with negative equity is that when your mortgage deal ends, you would end up on the standard variable rate which may not be as competitive as the previous rate. If your equity has dropped, you may not be able to get such a good mortgage rate – so you’ll end up paying more when you re-mortgage. That is of course assuming that you are able to move off the SVR and get a new mortgage deal.

Why do you think banks are asking for higher deposits nowadays, and being increasingly picky about who they let have a mortgage? Do you think they want a 20% deposit because they expect prices could drop by 20%, therefore protecting themselves against the mortgage owner defaulting, and leaving the bank with a house worth less than the mortgage owed on it…..?

But if prices drop and that deposit became 15%, 10%, 5%, or even 0% over the next couple of years, how would you then feel? Especially if you wait, and prices do drop, then your deposit may suddenly become 30%, 35%, or 40% (by virtue of prices falling). In that time you would have ‘paid off’ more of your mortgage buy not even having a mortgage – go and figure out how long it would take to pay off 10% of your mortgage. Without referring back to any numbers, I’d suspect you wouldn’t pay 10% off in 3 years.

I’d strongly recommend you try and do some reading up on the subject – understand exactly how a mortgage works, find out what the balance of your mortgage will be on a month-by-month or year-by-year basis (a real eye opener!), and then also look at what economic factors underpin the housing market (availability of cheap credit etc). When you have done that, you can then make an informed decision on what you are doing.

Sorry if I come across as harsh – it really isn’t my intention to. I see so many people brainwashed into thinking that buying a house is a one way bet, but it really isn’t. What I’m saying is just understand what you are doing and how things could pan out differently to how you might envisage!

Why not have a look at some of the data on housepricecrash.co.uk, there is some interesting info and stats on there and some compelling information which points to prices dropping over the coming years.

There is a link to a report on there today with RICS forecasting falls of up to 10% in 2012. If you have a deposit of 10%, how would you feel if that had effectively disappeared in a year or two from now? If you dont understand how or when negative equity could become an issue to you, are you sure you have fully understood the implications of the single biggest purchase you’ll ever make??!

Have you actually looked at the amount of mortgage you pay off in the first few years of a mortgage? It is very little, and quite surprising when you actually look at it; you are mostly paying interest. People talk about rent being dead money, but then paying interest to a bank is equally ‘dead’ money.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but as you are only 24 do you really want to be held down by a house? Clearly I know nothing about your financial circumstances, but it is clear from this thread that the cost of ‘owning’ a house is likely to be more than renting. House prices aren’t going anywhere fast, and there is a good chance they will continue to drop over the next few years. Why not rent a bit longer, save some more cash towards your deposit, have a nice holiday or two, and see how it plays out. The last thing you want at your age is to be stuck in negative equity…..

There are a couple of bits which are a bit more tow path than tarmac road, and not having owned a road bike in the past I’m not entirely sure what I’ll get away with. No showers at work, but dont fancy riding in wearing work clothes so will prefer a pannier over a rucksack.

How much do i need to spend / any tips for where to get 2nd hand other than ebay?

One worthy addition is PlayTv. Basically a little box which your aerial plugs into, and then connects to the PS3 via one of the USB ports. You then install the PlayTV software (it comes on a dvd), and your PS3 is now a PVR. It upscales standard definition TV, and is really slick. You can’t get them new anymore, but I got mine 2nd hand in Game for £12.99 – there are plenty on Ebay too.

Absolutely fantastic bit of kit, the only downside is that you have to download a software plug in to get series link functionality, which costs £6.

What size do you have Sambob?? Large?

timwillows – ygm

:-)

What’s the benefits of PSE10 over PSE9? I’m a complete novice (I can’t even use layers properly yet!), so I’m guessing PSE 9 would be enough for me?!

:-)

I’ve got a copy of Gimp on my PC now, but when I tried to open a raw file it didn’t seem to recognise the file (.cr2). Am I doing something wrong?

Get yourself a singletrack premier subscription and then get access to the entire back catalogue of the magazine on your iPad. That’s what I’d do, but cant justify £400 on an iPad!

I’ve rented through your agent, Robert Oulsnam, before, and I can confirm that they are a bunch of useless, work shy, lying t*sspots. I’d avoid them at all costs if I were you, my landlord at the time was a nice guy but they made the whole experience frustrating and painful.

Try my-picture.co.uk. A guy at work had a couple done recently, they looked pretty good to me and very cheap too.

Thread closed.

Thread closed.

I’m currently reading understanding exposure by bryan peterson. So far so good.