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Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2011 10:28 pm
by DNgroundworks
Must say interesting thread, ive not been alive long enough to have any worthwhile input, but i can say that borrowing money has been very easy for me for some reason? I wish i had no debt, i have 30k in bank loans, credit cards, finance deals and all the rest, needed it to live really when times were bad over the past couple of years. Paying it off though was 40k this time last year :p
Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2011 10:42 pm
by Pablo
lutonlagerlout wrote:the solar panel thing is another flash in the pan,same as the stone cladding of the 70s,and maintenance free upvc of the 90s
I know a couple of lads who have done their bollox setting up expecting 2 jobs a week and getting 3 installs in a month
its highly competitive
all the figure they give for yield are total BS
the one from the job we did recently has earned the client 230 quid in 4 months
gonna take a while to get their 12k back
as has been said logs are getting pricey,my mate does 30 quid a week in his log burner,
there are some schemes that are worth the money my folks being one example. They got theirs in 6 weeks ago and have already earned 300 quid and the energy they use is also free. It's insurance backed for 25years and cost about 15 grand but they have a large south facing roof so payback will be soon enough especially when you count the energy bill into it. The power is split after the meter so the get paid for the energy they generate and use. Log burners are good but they need to run the radiators to make then worth the money. They cost at least a grand to install and thats before any plumbing work so it's expensive. I have a multi fuel stove and it's cheaper and more efficient to run on coal than wood. The coal costs more but lasts much longer and burns much hotter so you use less. If you have even slightly unseasoned wood you're screwed and it'll never get got enough. As for the Tories i'm not a fan but what can they do we're broke and we expect a magic bullet from then. Brown and Blair sold the family silver and allowed the civil service to get to big to a point where it is now unsustainable. Most of those that complain offer solutions that involve spending more money with the misguided assumption that there's money there to spend. As for selling work abroad it's illegal in European law to discriminate against a tender or bid due to nationality so their hands are tied. Thats another one you can thank Blair for.
Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2011 11:31 pm
by lutonlagerlout
its the same with the feed in tariff pablo,they get 42p PKWH ,and get to use the electric
I will check next week as i am doing the final on that job
did your folks ask about cleaning?
the guy said just use a damp cloth every 2 years? LO L
very convenient when they are 7 M up on a roof
what system have your folks got must be massive to earn that sort of dough?
but what i mean is that solar panels are the latest buzz jobs for all the salesmen and charlatans
you know the ones,time share,windows,insurance,PIC,etc etc
there is always a new thing they are trying to flog you
LLL
Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2011 11:39 pm
by Carberry
DNgroundworks wrote:Must say interesting thread, ive not been alive long enough to have any worthwhile input, but i can say that borrowing money has been very easy for me for some reason? I wish i had no debt, i have 30k in bank loans, credit cards, finance deals and all the rest, needed it to live really when times were bad over the past couple of years. Paying it off though was 40k this time last year :p
What I understand after speaking to my friend who works in the industry
Borrowing money was easy for everyone and that is the problem.
Sub prime mortgages, where there is more risk for the lender but potentially more profit, were being handed out like sweeties.
These mortgages were being handed out like sweeties because the debt was then being sold / being invested in by banks and investment companies but the very high risk and the really bad debt was being hidden from the investment companies through some creative accounting. More people were investing in them, which made them more valuable which meant more people wanted in on the action so they were handing out mortgages to people who had no place having one.
We were at the height of a housing market boom so everybody saw owning a house as an investment and everybody had to have one; My brother in law was at university studying accounting and was asked by a workmate for some advise on why he had no money... he was paying £1200 a month for his mortgage on a crappy wee flat in a crap part of town and had no idea why he had no money.
Eventually people stopped paying their mortgages because they had no money and should have never been given a mortgage let alone such big ones. They were even being charged for lawyers after they defaulted because they didn't read the small print on their agreement.
The investments in these mortgages were then worthless because nobody was paying off their mortgage so the banks that had a silly amount of money invested in them lost a lot of money. These banks invested a lot of money in them because they were making a lot of money out of them and there were no checks in place in the industry, when somebody is making some money they hand them even more money until the shit hits the fan. They happily gamble away because it isn't their money and they are making obscene bonuses. Bear stearns was the first big name to go down then not long after the Lehman brothers went down which was a huge blow because they had £600 billion in assets (biggest bankruptcy filing in US history)
When Lehman brothers went down it had a huge knock on effect around the world, the dow jones fell 4.4% in 1 day. All these banks invest in each other too so when 1 goes down they all start falling; It also doesn't help that most businesses are run on debt so when the sh*t hits the fan they go under.
Here in Britain RBS went down (had £1 billion invested in lehman brothers), if the british goverment didn't bail out RBS then Scotland would have been royally screwed because RBS had something like 4 times the GDP of Scotland. Fred Goodwin, the Chief executive has an obscene pension (something like £700,000 a year) ridiculous bonuses and shares etc when all he did was f*ck the bank, unfortunately that was and still is common practice.
Big businesses go down then the small and medium sized businesses that they have subcontracted work to go down with them. Small businesses get further shafted with ridiculous bureaucracy.
All these idiots in Europe were so desperate to get their massive european union that they started letting in crap countries that weren't ready. They assumed they would be 1 great big happy country before the economy turned to sh*t but they were wrong so now Greecy, Portugal, Spain etc are about to screw the French and German Economy thanks to them being in the euro.
Britain jumping in to the EU opened the floodgates to immigrants coming here for our benefits system and to get, comparitively speaking, a hell of a lot of money for easy jobs because the pound was worth so much more than the euro - my friend was the boss of a polish guy who had a PhD in chemistry and was working on a factory assembly line for peanuts but was still more than he would make at home. All these immigrants were /are happy to work in crap conditions for bugger all because it is much better than what they get at home and we have a generation of w*nkers who don't want to get their hands dirty for a living and think they are above doing crap jobs.
When we were going through our boom period Labour started spending on stupid stuff because it made them look good (don't kid yourselves, any other political party would have done the same), rather than take the unpopularchoice and cut spending, cut government debt etc They created a lot of unnecessary civil servant jobs, which screws everyone because of government pensions, to tell everyone they were cutting unemployment.
Their pledge to give everyone an education lead to the devalution of highers / A levels because every idiot is passing them then going to university to get handed an art degree or some equally useless degree. Everyone starts to think that manual labour and trades are the choice for morons, the ones that can't get in to university. My generation of self entitled tw*ts think that because they went to university they should walk in to a £40k a year job with benefits and pension even though they got a degree in a useless subject; In America students are protesting right now because it cost them $100,000 to go to university and they can't get a job with their medieval literature degree.
The bank of England's answer to all of this is quantitive easing, the printing of more money but apparently they don't print any at all. They just bung an extra 0 or 2 in to a computer and it is all done virtually which brings me on to the crux of the problem.
Investment bankers are gambling, if they're not gambling then they are insider trading which is illegal but everyone does it (again, heard straight from the horses mouth). They are making obscene amounts of money by gambling with even more obscene amounts of money and they have no morals or conscience. How are they gambling? I didn't realise just how many types of things you can invest in in the market until my friend (masters in investment analysis) told me some of the methods and tactics... betting on whether shares / commodities / currencies will go up or down, betting on the people betting, borrowing money to buy shares, selling them as soon as they make a profit then returning the money they couldn't afford to lose in the first place.... Short selling was one that amused me
"Short-selling is the opposite of buying stocks -- it entails the selling of shares that the seller does not own in the hope that the price will fall. ". All of this is going on on computers, they aren't even seeing the share certificates etc they are just buying and selling constantly. It is crazy.
Why doesn't the government curb the bankers and limit their power? because they can't. The corporations are more powerful than the government. Goldman Sachs is more powerful than the US government.
Everyone needs to cut back but nobody wants to because they have never had to properly work for anything, never had to go without. What is their answer? to protest but they are protesting for the wrong reasons, instead of demanding that the goverment not cut their wages or pension which will have to happen in the short term at least, they should be protesting because capitalism in it's current state isn't working, the rich are getting too rich and crapping on everyone from a great height.
Going to stop ranting now and go to bed
:laugh:
ps: Forgot to mention corporations and tax dodgers...google paid something like 2% in tax because of tax loopholes. Can the government do anything about it? hell no because they will just pack up and piss off to some crap country in asia or africa which means less money in tax and more unemployed pissed off voters. And I didnt even get started on the illegal war that nobody wanted.
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 7:52 am
by Pablo
mate that would've taken me so long to write that I wouldn't have made it to bed last night.
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 8:49 am
by Carberry
Pablo wrote:mate that would've taken me so long to write that I wouldn't have made it to bed last night.
I'm a fast typist, been mucking about with computers for 20 years and I'm a nerd :laugh:
I also needed something to do while I was fixing a laptop for guy who delivers our gas.
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 9:07 am
by London Stone Paving
I think you've skirted over the issues Stu, any chance of a bit more detail 
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 9:20 am
by local patios and driveway
we gpt a few topic going on here but i wanted to mention my friend is a salesman for a cardiff solar company, they sell loads of solar systems, they pay for the install and panels, you get it totally free and you get maybe a 1/3 of your elctric for free saving however much a year for nothing, they make money on selling electric to the utillities but you must sign up for a set period, the electric compny do a deal with the installers to pay 5k up front towards the install meaning the install costs nothing and after 3 years the company is making profit on the returns, every day the amount rises. its a god set up for all involved. the other option is £9,999 for the full install and full rights to profits.
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:51 am
by DNgroundworks
Nice post carberry, i think personally that the media have a huuge influence ive had people cancel jobs because they saw some dude on tv predicting total doom and gloom, doesnt inspire confidence in me, so how the hell is it going to inspire confidence in someone spending 10k on a luxury driveway?
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 1:04 pm
by seanandruby
get confused by politics ( amongst other things ha ha ). But i do know when something is broken it needs fixing by a competant tradesperson. Now we all know the economy is fecked so we, or rather you who trust in cowboys, elect rogue traders to put it right. Just like the pikies the government has bodged it. Wasn't they supposed to do a pukka job ??? I would of sooner have had bob the builder brown on the job.
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 1:11 pm
by Carberry
local patios and driveways wrote:we gpt a few topic going on here but i wanted to mention my friend is a salesman for a cardiff solar company, they sell loads of solar systems, they pay for the install and panels, you get it totally free and you get maybe a 1/3 of your elctric for free saving however much a year for nothing, they make money on selling electric to the utillities but you must sign up for a set period, the electric compny do a deal with the installers to pay 5k up front towards the install meaning the install costs nothing and after 3 years the company is making profit on the returns, every day the amount rises. its a god set up for all involved. the other option is £9,999 for the full install and full rights to profits.
I heard that it was a bit of a con, you sign away the rights to your roof space for 25 years and you get next to nothing in return.
In my previous post I also forgot to mention the state of America. They have a national debt of $14 trillion. That is $14,000,000,000,000 that they owe. The government issues bonds to help deal with this debt, people buy them as an investment and the government pays them back with interest over 10 years or something.
China has been buying up a lot of these bonds which has contributed to the devaluing of their currency compared to the dollar. This makes it a nightmare for US to export to China and makes importing chinese junk much more favourable because they get more chinese junk for their dollar. This has pissed off America but they can't do a lot about it because China is the biggest purchaser of their debt (last figure I heard was $1 trillion).
One of the other reasons the corporations get away with so much is because of their government lobbying, donating a lot of money to presidential and party campaigns, and the fact that they hire former politicians to work for them. Look in to the Enron scandal to see more details.
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 5:32 pm
by rab1
The Russians/Chinese could destroy western style democracy in an instant if the choose to do so, we owe that much money and no western bank has the cash to cover its debt what happens if they get snippy.....?.
??? ???
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 6:29 pm
by flowjoe
Watched something last night on the beeb saying the Chinese economy is going down the pan ?, only banks lending out there are the shadow banks and they lend at silly rates
This, higher wage demands and the fact that Europe and America are not importing as much crap means a lot of manufacturers are going under.
This could be a great leveller me thinks
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 8:22 pm
by lutonlagerlout
is a billion, a thousand million or a hundred million?
do i care what politicians do?
not a lot
as a resourceful person like a lot of you on here I will always make ends meet
one way or another
LLL
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 9:11 pm
by Carberry
lutonlagerlout wrote:is a billion, a thousand million or a hundred million?
do i care what politicians do?
not a lot
as a resourceful person like a lot of you on here I will always make ends meet
one way or another
LLL
1 billion is a thousand million.
1 trillion is a thousand billion.