Saturday, October 13, 2007

sittin, drinkin eggnog in the middle of the night

It's 1:14 am and I'm still up.

Oh, I've already been to bed, for nearly an hour, but I couldn't sleep. So I got up and walked around the house.

Now I'm sitting here writing this, and watching "Escape to the Country" on BBC Canada, drinking some Egg Nog. (Yep, it's out there already and I only have a couple of months to drink my year's supply of dairy.)

I'm going to be bugger all tired tomorrow and I know that, but my body doesn't seem to realize it.

Spent some time praying for the kids, and some of you, but now I'm out of ideas.

. . . . . . .

Hmmm, she just found the couple a lovely place in the country with three garages and outbuildings for 270,000 pounds! What a deal!

Is everybody in the UK that rich? Cause the people on these shows always have tons of cash to buy houses with...

Well, i should try to get to sleep again. I don't want to go to the Holly Cole concert tomorrow night and end up sleeping through it. I hate when i do that, mostly with movies. Pay 25 bucks to see a movie with Lauralea, and fall asleep.

oup, she just found the couple a lovely home in Lincolnshire for 295,000. Looks dead lovely. Old, lots of character. I bet they take that one. A husband and wife, both accountants, and no kids. He's into small sports cars, she's into gardening, hardcore it looks like, if her garden says anything about her.

Anyway, my eggnog is gone so I might as well go lay in bed some more.

Nite.

3 comments:

  1. £270,000 for a decent house + 3 garages? I could buy that AND clear the mortgage after selling this house. And you KNOW we're not 'rich' in that way. But 2 accountants w/o sprogs should be pretty well off. I've never seen that program though (for reasons you know).

    It's just stuff is expensive here - I can't see how Ben could possibly buy a house round here without inheriting significant amounts of money.

    Hope you did get to sleep OK after that, and you'll be OK today.

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  2. "Rich" is a relative term, I suppose.

    One of my mom's best friends (from her nursing days) lives in England. They seemed like "ordinary" people in terms of money and I remember being shocked and awed that they sold their house for £250,000. But I guess that's the way of it and not just England.

    It seems to me that, doing a straight-across comparison, Europeans have more disposable income than North Americans---it seems like my friends and family from across the pond are regularly making trips all over the world. Or maybe they're just better at saving than we are.

    Toni: how are the English for buying on credit? I know around these parts people mortgage and remortgage and max out credit cards and then get more credit cards to max out and that's seen as normal, as the way people just live. Perhaps it's different in the UK and Europe.

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  3. Some do, Marc.

    There was a guy I knew through work - PhD molecular biologist, one of the brightest guys I've worked with, whose attitude was 'credit is the way forward - I want it and I want it now!'. No idea what's happened to him - that was 10 years ago.

    But some still buy on credit like that. I gave that example because I normally view the 'credit to the max' thing as being a sign of low intelligence/weak character, but in Martin's case it was just an expectation from having been a student. Debt is an issue, but it's also regulated in Europe so that people don't get so badly hammered these days.

    As for house prices, it's long been a thing here to push prices as high as the market will bear, and everyone has to play the game. So you do what we did, get on the lowest rung of the ladder and after a few years you trade up and increase the mortgage. A starter home (1 bedroom apartment) round here is around £100K. If it wouldn't hurt tens of thousands of ordinary people, I'd like to see another housing market crash like we did 17 years ago. We're stupidly over-inflated now, and prices need to drop.

    Just remember - you can't spend it if it's tied up in your house - and we all have to live somewhere (PA would be tempting if it weren't for the mozzies and ice - and the lack of work for me).

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