The Lord Ashcroft analysis showed Corbyn was streets ahead among the under 50’s and it was only the over 75’s or something that swung it towards the tories.

Not that the over 75 vote is worth any less, but still I think it’s interesting to reflect on the fact that those with the biggest stake in the economy at that time, ie the under 60’s, were happy to elect Corbyn on the whole, despite the huge campaign by the right wing media to characterise his politics as being economically suboptimal.

Resist til December. The main thing that makes Christmas food exciting is that it’s exclusive to a particular, limited time of year. If you start eating it now, you’ll be bored of it by Christmas.

If the stuff about the well off fleeing high tax was true then you’d expect the US state with the highest taxes to have the lowest proportion of millionaires, no? Cos it’d be super easy to move across to another state, so obviously they’d all do that to avoid the higher taxes.

But in reality the US state with the highest taxes – California – not only does not have the lowest proportion of millionaires, but actually has the highest. There must be something about the good living and fine business available in California that makes those people think it’s worth paying the extra tax for?

We’ve got a big thick bamboo board with a lip which hooks over the work surface so it stays in place really well. It looks good so sits there all the time, no need to pack it away. I would never go back to plastic.

My most recent buyer requested both a boiler service and the extra surveys.

I said if they wanted extra surveys they would have to pay for them. They didn’t bother.

But I decided that since the boiler hadn’t been serviced for 12 months, it was reasonable to expect that I should keep it in good working order during the sale, so I paid for the service which cost less than £100.

When buying, I didn’t get a survey done on the heating system, but should have, as it was not working at all and cost over a grand all in to get working, and I’m still left with a miserable old boiler which could fail at any minute

So if I’ve got this right, among other things the Tories set up illegal contracts to steal millions of pounds of tax payer cash to give to their mates.

Starmer has been gifted a few pairs of trousers from a private individual using their own money.

And the conclusion is “they’re all the same”?

Excuse my ignorance but wasn’t all the money created and sprayed around during covid responsible for the big subsequent spike in inflation which decimated living standards across the country?

Doesn’t sound like something we want more of to me.

@intheborders that’s of the amount left over after all other costs. If my total income including pension contributions is 100% then the current split is approx 40% costs, 60% pension/ISA/mortgage equity

I’m currently allocating about 60% to pension, 10% to S&S ISA and 30% to the mortgage.

This is calculated so as to have the mortgage paid off by 50 (unless we move to a more expensive house which I’m currently mulling over) and then maximise pension tax efficiency while still adding a little to the S&S ISA as an insurance policy against possible changes to private pension access age and or tax treatment.

As for bonds, personally I think they have a place to reduce volatility. We haven’t had a proper sustained equity crash for about 15 years which I think might be making people a little complacent. If you can’t handle seeing your portfolio drop by 40%+, history suggests you probably shouldn’t be in 100% equities.

You’re supposed to be able to choose from a range of suppliers but when I run my post code through city fibres postcode checker, talk talk is the only option. Maybe they have some sort of exclusivity agreement for a period of time.

Since you don’t pay city fibre direct, my guess is that city fibre get paid by talk talk or other service provider, for every person that signs up and maybe an ongoing fee thereafter. City fibre therefore have an incentive to employ their own marketing teams to try and get people signed up on their network with talk talk.

But cityfibre probably don’t do that themselves. I think they would employ a separate sales and marketing company, who in turn get paid a commission for every signup. So in the end it’s probably legit, but the person you spoke to is not a direct employee of either talk talk or cityfibre, just someone working for a sales company who are given a list of people to call for whom the service has recently been made available. Despite ultimately working on behalf of talk talk, they might not know that talk talk are your current provider.

I wonder if the quoted 3% “over performance” is the difference between a high risk fund (100% equity, maybe tilted towards selected sectors) and a ‘typical pension fund’ which will be 30%-40% bonds and generally be expected to deliver lower returns. Essentially they’d be charging you £2k per year to put you in something like lifestrategy 100% instead of lifestrategy 60%.

If the idea of your pot losing a lot of value scares you then I’d say you want to be going in the other direction – lowering your risk and consequently also your expected returns. Did they ask you any questions about risk tolerance at all? Recommending high return/risk funds to somebody who has openly told them they don’t want to risk big drops in value doesn’t sound right to me.

Delete, I don’t want to lose any more brain cells getting involved in this partisan BS

I liked Top Gear back in the day but never got into the Grand Tour, which seemed quite sad and desperate whenever I watched it.

Clarkson has made no end of stupid anti-cycling comments over the years which I feel has definitely fed the anti-cyclist culture war and worsened the risks faced by people on bikes, as well as making it harder for society to achieve the benefits available via more active travel. Personally I doubt it’s a coincidence that this has worked out well for the motor industry.

My workplace one is with aviva and I have the choice of lots of different funds. As it happens I stuck with the default fund as it looks fine (circa 80% equity and no home bias) and fees are competitive. Can’t see any advantage in moving to a SIPP and having to mess around claiming tax relief etc.

Having been poor in my 20’s and finding that quite grim enough already, I wouldn’t wish being poor in old age on anyone.

On the other hand I can’t think of many situations where having more money in old age will lead to a particularly bad outcome.

For those reasons, while I think I’ve found a sensible balance, I am saving quite aggressively for old age.

I can’t help but suspect a lot of the “jam today” postings are made from a position of unrevealed security, often inheritance, enough at least to keep the poverty wolf from the door.

For those of us without that luxury, the risk is much sharper.

In my part of the midlands at least, reasonable starter homes are available for as little as £160k, which is affordable to a couple on minimum wage. Can’t see how that could be described as a crisis really. Is the crisis not just a south east thing? In which case localised rather than national solutions feels more suitable.

The Lord Ashcroft polling is out, which gives us the best idea of the demographic breakdown of voters.

If you’ve seen these before you’ll know it really hammers home how reliant the Tories always are on the pensioner vote.

Unsurprisingly this year they’ve been annihilated among the under 65’s, but still won among the over 65’s.

I wonder if the old adage that people drift to the right as they age will remain true for gen’s x and y, having just spent 14 years witnessing first hand the joys of a Tory government?

Reform voters also generally older and from the lower socioeconomic classes.

Lots of other insight:

How Britain voted and why: My post-vote poll

If you’ve got core strength, flexibility, staying active and body weight all sorted then the next things that comes to mind are bike fit, or maybe you could benefit from being upright more (ie less cycling more walking), the latter especially if you work at a desk also.

Make sure core strength is properly covered in your training plan though. Maybe try some supplementary pilates workouts to be sure.

For short term recovery, assuming it’s a muscle spasm then regular cobra, child’s pose, cat-cow and the like work for me. The aim is to get the muscles moving so they release from spasm. It’s a gradual process but the more you move, the quicker the recovery will be. Personally I prefer using the muscle over 3rd party physical manipulation (as in foam rollers, massage) but i’m sure they can both be effective.

I would cut all contact other than in writing (email, WhatsApp is fine, just needs to be written down). If I was unhappy with the work I would refuse to pay a penny until they came back and did what was agreed. If the work seems to fix the problem then I’d make a reasonable offer. If they insist on you paying the original quote value then tell them to put it through the small claims court.

The law is on your side. The fact that so many people just let them get away with this sort of thing is why it’s so rife.

We had multiple offers on the old house a couple of years ago and accepted one that was not the highest but was the best combination of chain-status and value. There was only a couple of grand in it though.

Not so easy when trying to buy in the same market. We were outbid a couple of times, lost out to a cash buyer once, and eventually had to overpay to get something less than ideal as circumstances meant we needed to move fairly quickly. It does still nag at me that we got a bad deal, I guess I just need to move past it.

It’s 15+ years away but if we were retiring now I think we’d go for a nice caravan on a seasonal pitch for April to Oct, which would have the advantage of being able to move every year so as not to get too bored with one particular area.

Then back home for some cosy winter vibes until Christmas followed by a lengthy long haul holiday to the tropics in Jan/Feb time, back in time for the nights to start getting longer and almost ready to get back out in the caravan.