Swapped my singlespeed to fixed and managed to get chain tension ok and wheel in straight, which is harder than you think…
And managed to ride 16 miles without forgetting to keep pedalling :-)

And put stans into my tubes to keep commuting punctures at bay

4 years(you were looking at the same time as me i remember) you have been waiting – where as that 4 years of rent has paid off 1/4 of the capital of my house.

You’re making massive (wrong) assumptions about my personal financial and employment circumstances actually… trust me, if I could have bought in 2013 (2, not 4 years ago) I would have done but for various reasons, I wasn’t able to get a mortgage at that time. Obviously if I’d known Osborne was going to create hyper inflation I would have bought earlier!

BWD – thanks for the ad hominem. It’s very childish, trying to score points with a stranger on the internet, given the very real damage being done…

My point is not so much about my own situation (in actual fact I’m more financially secure than I ever thought I would be at this age) but about the UK economy and the impact on it from all the money being sucked into the banks or to already wealthy people as mortgage and rent payments instead of being spent in job-creating consumption and investment… and also the insidious impact it has on our appetite for hard work and entrepreneurialism if it’s easier to just sit at home and ‘get rich’… Gordon Brown and Osbourne know us better than we know ourselves, it seems

Do some wider reading – FT and Economist for e.g. and look at the readers’ comments on house price stories if you want to get a feeling for the wider sentiment (ie: not mine) – in particular whether the millenials who you’ll be hoping to sell your house to are willing to play the game…

as i say every time broess … you have to live somewhere – dont forget that part – bit like the empty flat analogy you used the other day.

The religious belief I’m referring to isn’t any rent/mortgage comparison, it’s the ‘ever rising prices’ thing.

London shot up in 2013 because of a wave of dirty foreign money and the introduction of government subsidy (Help to buy) + BTL becoming suddenly very popular (probably a combination of zero interest rates, dire pension returns and QE trying to find a home), NOT because of a massive and sudden increase in demand. Prices were dead flat 2008 – 2012 – and shot up in Q3 2013 for no apparent reason… 20% within a matter of weeks in my personal experience in SE26.

the bubble is now spreading out of London as people like me and wotsit on the estate agent thread bail out – in his case to take his cash and move north, in my case, the desperate hope I won’t be paying rent out of my pension…

This combination of sources of £££ will not continue ad infinitum for the next 25 years! Read the FT and Economist and look at the very serious concerns about global asset bubbles and the global economy for some perspective…

many sites will not be viable to run if everyone block ads, should be pretty obvious really.

Their proposition’s not strong enough then. Commerce works when customers are willing to pay for a good or service. If your good or service is something customers aren’t willing to pay for and you have to find some other way of driving revenue then it’s not a working commercial proposition is it?

I suspect that the advertising-instead-of-charging business model is something that has allowed a lot of sites to survive who, really and truly, have very little utility to offer.

Even if prices drop to 10% of their 2007 value I’ve still got a house worth £25k. If I’d rented I’d have nothing.

So, you think if the proposition to first time buyers was ‘take out this massive loan and in 10 years time you’ll have a house worth only 10% of that loan, with most of it still to pay back’ – that people would be buying 8O

In any case you wouldn’t have a house worth anything – you’d be living in a house owned by the bank and a massive amount of debt to pay off!

Like I said – quasi-religious-belief type irrationality underpins the UK housing market, not rationale assessment, if that’s the best business case you can come up with!

Ever watched Life of Brian? They had a field day with this kind of thinking…

Blimey. 40 miles further south into London and you wouldn’t even get a small 2-bed flat for that any more!

Nice idea, if the advertising wasn’t so overblown it wouldn’t have become the issue that it is

This. I work in Marketing and I don’t believe in upsetting or nagging my customers into doing business with me. It damages the brand.

The thing that STW won’t allow me to mention is a natural reaction to excessive advertising which is considered a nuisance. If we as an industry had been more thoughtful about how we use the technology available then we wouldn’t have created a problem to which consumers needed to find a solution.

I agree that there are lots of business models for whom this is a problem, but if your proposition is strong enough (and for me, STW is) then you will find that people will be willing to pay for your service and you won’t need to ruin the customer experience with excessive advertising.

The beauty of capitalism (when it’s working properly) is it gives you the opportunity to adapt to emerging challenges, and continue to thrive…

And if you’re struggling MTFU persevere, you’ll get stronger and it’ll get easier.

It won’t get easier, but you will get faster :-)

Given that you’ve been burgled and therefore have proof the house needs more security, if the landlord refuses to put in better security, is there any legal action or just complaint to the council you can make to force him to put in better security?
If it was me, with a landlord like that I’d be moving anyway…

If I understand your OP then someone else has raised a grievance now as well as you?
If so, great news hopefully. Every instance I’ve ever seen of workplace bullying has been ignored by HR or any senior manager so at least you seem to work for an organisation which has the balls to do something about it…

My 48:18 has been a fine all-round gear. I did change for a while to 46:18 but it was way too spinny.

48:18 is not to hard to start from the lights, spins out c 20mph but if you grit your teeth and get on with it you can get up some pretty steep stuff. I don’t know where you ride but I could get up both sides of Crystal Palace on 48:18, although not without effort!

I don’t know if they’re centrally managed or franchised but I used Big Yellow Storage over Xmas for a couple of weeks and they were excellent – good pricing, great service, easy to find etc

Next you’ll be telling me that Barclays PingIt doesn’t have any flaws…

Next you’ll be telling us that cash is 100% safe from criminals :-)

The point is that there’s no evidence so far that Contactless fraud rates are significantly higher than Chip and PIN, not that it’s flawless… Of course there’s a risk, that’s why the £30 limit was set. But the calculation was that the extra gain for the banks in revenues from additional card transactions which were previously made with cash would be greater than the costs of any fraud…

Yes but when you add in the value of your asset after 25 years…

And what happens if prices don’t go up like they have done in the past?

All the baby boomers will be selling up over the next 10-15 years to either fund their nursing home care or to release the equity to either use as their pension or give to their kids so they can buy their own place…

Prices are only going up at the moment because a) a tidal wave of corrupt foreign money has poured into London from 2012 onwards b) repeated government subsidies from 2013 onwards to stop the market from crashing. Neither of these things will go on forever.
Osborne has already realised that he’ll fail to get the vote of the under 40s in 5 years time if they’re still renting and unable to start a family…
He also realises that in 10 years time, the MPs in Parliament will be the generation that are currently priced out of housing and their agenda around house prices is likely to be different from the current one given their current experience.. by all accounts they’re already learning the lessons their idiot parents forgot about living a life in debt…

The idea that UK house prices will always and forever go up is largely one based on experience of the last 20 years since we forgot about the 1989 bust. It’s more akin to a religious belief than a fact/data-driven view which is why it’s so damn hard to get people who believe it to think differently!

Shouldn’t we actually just build affordable housing, rather than taxing successful people ?

Odd definition of ‘successful’ – the Prime London bubble has primarily come from criminal money laundering..

Foreign criminals push up London house prices

I wish action like this would work, especially has this has directly impacted me – living in London since 2000 I moved out a month ago because I simply can’t afford the rent any more, let alone afford to buy… exiled from my own home city by government-permitted money laundering…

However, this has been a deliberate policy by the current government – a petition will do nothing. In all honesty your best bet is to leave London. In time the bubble will pop as more people leave in frustration. Prime London is already looking ropey as China slows up, Russia falls deeper into recession and the Malaysians struggle to pay what they owe to the developers. Nine Elms is looking particularly ropey.

But as you can see from Woppit’s Bubble thread – there’s little appetite in the UK to actually accept we have a problem, let alone solve it….

I used to work for barclays at the time they introduced this tech to their cards. At the launch have meeting I told the presentation guy it was too easy to clone the card and spend money without you knowing. He said it was secure so I asked him for u is card and cloned it within a few minutes using my new NFC phone then used it to pay for stuff on the demo terminal. He went rather white and made a phone call. They still launched the cards.

I won’t have a contact less card for this reason.

Would you mind telling us what year this was? We can easily check when Barclays launched contactless. And also, maybe you could tell us what phone it was and we can do a little research to see if NFC was available on that handset model at that time…

There have been a lot of media scare stories about contactless over the years, but funnily enough there’s been very few anecdotes or data since the massive increase in transactions seen from 2014 onwards which sugggests any increase in rates of fraud… with a massive increase in use, you’d expect a commensurate increase in fraud, if fraud was in fact an issue…

If was actually was that easy to just do a lap on the tube and skim £££ in £30 chunks from peoples contactless cards, it would of been done, exposed, and fixed by now. If it was that easy, they’d all be at it.

Correct. There are literally millions more contactless transactions per day on TFL than there were just two years ago after cash was banned on the busses, and the big push to contactless by TFL last year. We would quite definitely know if there’d been a big rise in fraud as a result

Brooess, maybe you can answer me a question?
If as a retailer a contactless card is fraudulently used and the card owner notifies the bank does the retailer still get paid?
The credit card companies are really pushing contactless by offering lower transaction fees , I’m just wondering how it benefits the card company.

I don’t see why the retailer wouldn’t get their cash but I don’t know the rules for sure – check with your Acquirer. I suspect they would have to reimburse the retailer otherwise there’d be limited takeup of contactless.

Contactless benefits the issuing bank because it means consumers will use card instead of cash – they don’t get revenue from a cash transaction, and neither do the acquiring bank.

Having worked in the payments industry I don’t remember ever seeing any data which suggested increased rates of fraud on contactless above the rate on chip and PIN… but plenty of media scaremongering playing to people’s unfounded fears of new tech.
3 things to remember:
1. The limit is there specifically to cap the fraud risk and to not make it worth criminals efforts
2. Even if you are defrauded, tell your bank and you should get it refunded (I’m not 100% sure on this, but ask your bank if you’re concerned
3. If crims want your cash then they’ll be finding more efficient ways of going after it than in £30 chunks! e.g. online banking or ecommerce fraud…

If I were you, I’d be more worried about the potential threat of removing cash completely out of circulation if and when we go to negative interest rates. EU has already begun this process by removing 500 Euro notes…
Negative interest rates incentivises us to remove all our funds from the banks and use cash instead, so banning cash becomes essential to stop runs on the banks and another total collapse…

Do you mean Vapour Rise? Fleece lined with windproof outer?
I have one which is over 10 years old and still going strong. very comfy, very warm and very breathable. My choice of top for winter walking including a lot of stuff in Scotland. But for me, too warm for riding or running.

i guess this hasn’t happened yet then ?

Well, the flat I didn’t rent on the basis the LL wouldn’t negotiate was still on Rightmove last time I looked last week, with the rent dropped from 900 to 875 – now empty since early November… so that’s roughly 3 months at £900 lost revenue… I would have been in and paying rent from before Xmas if they’d been more reasonable…

Anecdote is not data but I think the LL miscalculated on this one, and I suspect not the only one who has… there’s quite a few flats coming on the market where I am with tenants in situ, being sold as ‘investments’. Who would do that if BTL was such great ‘investment?’

Don’t assume your income’s going to rise over time and don’t buy somewhere with the idea of ‘climbing up the ladder’ in 5-10 years time… there’s no guarantee either will happen.

Buy somewhere you’d be happy to be in for the rest of your life – and you’d be happy for your kids to grow up in… and whatever you do, remember that interest rates are at emergency levels, put there to stop a total collapse in 2008 – ask yourself if the outlook is so good, why we’re still at those levels… and that interest rates WILL go up during the term of your mortgage, and therefore so will your repayments

Living standards going nowhere fast…

I don’t mean to put you off but if you look at the underlying ‘strength’ of the UK economy and the absence of any real drivers of growth, you’ll see tha the current idea that house prices, wages and living standards will repeat what they’ve done over the last 20+ years is more akin to a religious belief than fact-based analysis…

and no matter how wrong it is prices keep going up.

Not everywhere and not always.

Plus, going back to the illusion of it all – the ‘gain’ existing homeowners get is not real unless they sell their home and move to a cheaper area or downsize, whilst also having to spend a chunk of that ‘gain’ on transaction costs – stamp duty, estate agents’ fees at the like.

Meanwhile, a chunk of your taxes goes on Help To Buy and Housing Benefit… so you’re paying for a chunk of your illusory gains with real taxes…

The only real wealth created from super high house prices is in the banks who get to charge us even more in interest rates as the nominal amount we borrow goes stratospheric.

As Agent007 says, the current situation, where ‘values’ are totally detached from the fundamentals e.g. wages – and is showing all the signs of a traditional bubble… e.g. Dutch Tulips, Wall Street 1929, UK housing late 80’s, US subprime 2007+… we appear to have BTLers bidding up prices by more than 3% in order to save themselves 3% in stamp duty – that’s not a sign of sensible investment strategy – it’s total stupidity – which usually precedes a crash. look at stockmarkets right now for e.g.

BTLers are going to find themselves in a storm of their own making as they massively increase supply of rental property available, buy at the top of the market expecting to be able to rinse tenants for the extra cost and then find the increased supply means tenants have the upper hand in price negotiations… then Osbourne’s tax changes kick in next year and the BLTers find themselves losing money every month…

Depends on how long you want the UK to continue stagnating and for your wages and pension to continue going nowhere I guess… you may have noticed that as prices go up, growth and wages have slowed up – which has got an awful lot to do with the fact most of us are putting so much into housing costs there’s not a lot left for anything else, so companies have no-one to sell to…

But that’s ok so long as we’re stupid enough to believe that housing ‘wealth’ is actually wealth rather than an illusion as THM notes… Osbourne realises we’re this stupid and has used to it good effect to win last year’s election and also the tax take through amplified Stamp Duty…

I wouldn’t underestimate the political risk to the Tories of a continued bubble – even hardened Tory pensioners are starting to understand its downsides as they have to give a chunk of their own unearned wealth to their kids or grandkids so they can get their own place… Osbourne is not blind to this – you can expect more attacks on BTL and more releasing of land and Planning rules I suspect.

Also worth remembering that in london in particular, transation numbers are falling through the floor. Fewer transations = less stamp duty revenue for a Chancellor who’s numbers are looking increasingly ropey. A decent drop in prices would get transaction numbers back up again cos right now too many FTBers are giving up…

Neither would I underestimate the impact of wider global economic issues on London – Saudis, Russians and Malaysians are all running out of cash to launder/speculate with…

Worth remembering that in time all the Boomers will be selling up to go into Nursing Homes. You may find the ‘supply’ issue somewhat disappears…

Either way, cleverer people than me think the situation’s looking less than optimistic…

Nine Elms/Battersea…

UBS expect London bust within 3 years

UK housing is a phenomenal screw up. So some people can have some illusory wealth, we’re killing the real economy, putting the younger generation into more debt than they can handle as well as holding their disposable income back for 25/35 years, and risking busting the banks again as and when a chunk of these debts go bad…

Sounds like an interesting thread.
I reckon you’ll get a right needling for it

Haven’t watched the programme but worth remembering ONS figures showing of the total welfare budget in 2013/14 that:
42% = pensions
15% = incapacity benefits
2% unemployment benefit

So we need to be looking at things like the <vote buying> triple lock if we want to get angry about inappropriate levels of government spending…
Housing benefit = 11%. Not sure how much goes to private landlords to via BLT but again – if we want to get angry…

Best not let TV programmes made for entertainment shape our views on politics IMO – it does us no favours

ONS figures[/url]

I always rode singlespeed in London – too many traffic lights and junctions for a geared bike – constantly changing up and down gears was a right pain. Singlespeed means you can keep focussed on the road and all the various hazards too, rather than spending any mental resources thinking about best gear to be in.
Also, much less to go wrong on a singlespeed and getting home from work and having to fix gears so I can ride in again tomorrow is not ideal.
I guess if you’re riding to Orpington you’re avoiding the supersteep hills around Chislehurst if you’re riding fixed!

1. Yoga – effective at building core strength for several thousand years so far!
2. Don’t just do one exercise, you’ll unbalance your core and possibly cause injury – your core has a front, a back and 2 sides!
3. Just pay for a personal trainer or physio for a couple of sessions – get someone qualified to assess you and make recommendations depending on your personal areas of weakness
4. Enjoy. You’ll be amazed at the effect is has on your speed and power…

I would imagine we’re going to see a lot more Landlords selling up, esp in the overheated SE and London over the next year.

As per the discussion above – costs are increasing because of recent changes, and the culture of BTL/property speculation being to attempt to make maximum return from minimal expense, usually based on debt-funding, means Landlords will typically try to increase the rent rather than just accept a lower margin

This is what happens when your income is driven by a need to cover the interest on the amount of debt you’ve taken out rather the more usual model of running a business when your costs can be managed…

There’s evidence that some Landlords are sensible and selling up as they realise that BTL has been (deliberately) holed beneath the waterline, whilst others think they can just rinse their tenants for more rent – somewhat ignoring the fact that a) wages are not going up and b) tenants do have options like house-sharing or just moving away (as I have) c) renting in the UK is a highly emotionally charged issue in the UK and tenants are increasingly less likely to keep quiet if they’re not happy.

Worth thinking about what the massive rise in the number of BLT mortgages means – it means more supply – possibly excess supply. Which gives tenants the upper hand…

Two anecdotes from me: a flat I tried to rent in December with a landlord who refused to negotiate – is still on the market, now at £25 less per month. Clearly the demand they expected isn’t there. They first put it on the market beginning November so that’s 3+months lost rent…

My new tenancy agreement has some very badly worded reference to annual rent increases using RPI. I asked for clarification as the wording was so (deliberately?) unclear and the agency told me they usually recommend a 5-6% increase! RPI is virtually zero, as are wages – so that’s just extortion! In the past I may have sucked this up but if they try and increase rent by that amount when RPI is at zero then they’ll be finding a lot of resistance this time around – I’m justifiably angry about this culture of ‘rinse the tenant for as much as you can get away with’ and I’m not alone…

OP: I would move out if I were you – there’s no security for you in your current position – attacks on BTL haven’t even really begun yet – Osbourne is seriously short of tax income + London house prices are looking really quite shaky when you look behind the vested interests’ propaganda and BoE haven’t even started taking action yet + plenty of evidence people are just moving out of London in despair – so a lot of landlords are going to realise their position is untenable and sell up… which is the point of attacking BTL of course…

Sadly when you provide a personal service some people think you are a pushover.

This tells you everything about the culture of BLT – hoard an essential good which is in scarce supply and then sell it back to the people who need it for greater than they would have to pay if they owned it themselves, and pretend you’re offering a service! Utter delusion and no doubt a self-defence mechanism… BTL is a debt-funded speculation on ever-increasing prices – simple. Nothing whatsoever to do with offering a service! AT least be honest with yourself about why you’re participating in BTL…

Well if we want our stuff delivered cheaply, the business is going to have to be a low-cost one isn’t it?

A mate of mine, born and bred in the Lakes and well-used to inclement weather is talking about bailing out to Oz – he’s just had enough this winter. Oz has the opposite problem of droughts of course.

Mind you, it’s not like we’ve not been warned… various beardy types have been telling us for 50+ years this is where we’d end up but we decided that owning 4x4s was more important…

If all the Northerners disappear off to Spain, it’ll sort out our overpopulation problem nicely, mind :-)

I read something recently which pointed out it’s the poorer countries which will be hit most by climate change and if it gets so bad that they simply can’t live there anymore it’ll make the current migration levels look like a picnic. It’ll be interesting to see Farage’s face when that happens :-)

I’m very impressed with the sound quality from a Chromecast Audio – and they’re only £35 :-) You do need the Spotify subscription so you can get higher sound quality setting though.

Alternatively, from your headphone jack is lousy quality. As per that thread up there about DAC’s – if you want to run the sound direct from your laptop then the Behringer DAC for £25 is very impressive.

With both Chromecast and the Behringer thing I can hear stuff that I’ve not heard before on CD – Technics deck and Denon amp – so I’m really quite impressed

+1 for the just ride up more hills.

I don’t know if this is the orthodox view but IME getting a singlespeed will teach your head and your legs a thing or two about how to get up hills through sheer effort :-)

They’re amazing, you think you’re supple and then get on one of these and it hurts like hell and you want to stop. Keep on it and a few weeks later it doesn’t hurt anymore – I find them great for dealing with DOMS or specific tightnesses.

IMO ignore the ‘get a cheap one’. I did that and it broke within a couple of months. Don’t forget, you’ll be putting your full weight on it when using it properly. I’m only 75kg…

The Grid is generally reckoned to be the best one going. Usually £40+ but currently at Wiggle at 50% off…

I know what you mean about giving stuff away for free and you get the feeling people are taking the mick. I’m doing some training at the moment which requires me to do stuff for free – and I really don’t mind as the experience is what I need, not the ££, but I do get the feeling some people think I’m a mug for doing stuff for free, and no-one likes to be taken in by a cynic.

Mind you – you still get rid of stuff you didn’t need and didn’t want to throw away, so lose nothing, and they’re still gits who’ll go through life without any real friends and will wonder why no-one likes them that much :-)

A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing :-)

I’m 5’11” with 33 inside leg and I was a medium, with 70mmm Stem which felt good for me

+1 for getting rid of any debt you have – it may well be costing you more than any gain you’d get from investing…

In terms of trackers – as Stoner says, think beyond FTSE 100 – there’s more than a few oil, gas, mining companies and banks in there… which under current circumstances may or may not prove to be good long term investments

The shareholders are pushing and driving for higher profits and dividends. When there is no possibility of growing sales through traditional models of growth (new product- existing market etc) the imagination has to find new ways of increasing profits

This is a really important insight. What’s going on here is similar to all the share buybacks that are going on (using borrowed money).

It’s a very bad sign, one of corporate failure rather than success. Incentives for senior management to keep the share price high, are massive. Disincentives for letting share prices drop are also massive.

Demand worldwide is currently lagging – the result of the 2008 debt hangover – the West is skint, hence China now slowing up, and the Chinese and other emerging markets are now also showing their limitations, hence all the doom and gloom about global growth this coming year.

I don’t think anyone cheats because they want to, they generally do it because they can’t achieve what they want through legitimate means. So these accounting games (and the share buybacks) are happening because demand is slack and therefore companies are neither growing nor making much profit. However their managers’ personal wealth and survival depends on looking like they’re making a profit, hence the tricks and sleights of hand.

Sooner or later these strategies will lose their effectiveness. Also worth remembering we’re balls deep in debt at government level. With wages stagnant, George’s tax numbers are looking very shaky. Whatever his external signs of confidence you can bet he’ll be looking at closing these loopholes soon enough to avoid UK being bust just as he goes for the premiership…

Someone on R4 today was making the point it’s massively disincentivising to small business who don’t have the international reach or the financial team to work out the loophole, working so hard to run a business and make a profit in a challenging environment, and seeing large corporates take the mick to such an extent.

Part of the point of free market capitalism in a democracy is that consumers can take their money elsewhere if they’re unhappy – as they did with Ratners…

However, who here has stopped using Google, Amazon, Starbucks etc? We could provide an incentive ourselves which could be very powerful, but despite all the complaining going on we’re doing very little about it… in the case of Amazon and Google I’m afraid I include myself…