Mike Meteor

The “friendly” personal touch always works best!!!!!!!, many moons ago bought her indoors a sewing machine, at the time a quite expensive model, said machine very quickly gave every indication of being troublesome and promptly destroyed it’s innards after about a months use, rang the shop, they passed the buck to the manufacturer who wanted a call out fee to look at the machine.

My response, Saturday afternoon march in and dump machine on front desk and loudly proclaim it to be a load of rubbish, amazingly I had a new machine in my hands and out the shop in about 10 minutes flat.

VT, understand what you’re saying, but politician and work in the same sentence?

silver fox, I would not even leave my wallet on show let alone sign the house over to my lot!!

That just illustrates the difference in families, sad but true,

But if you have no equity in it it belongs to your lender not to you.

When we downsized on retirement, our daughters “bought” the new property and we have a free secure tenure for as long as we need/wish, rather different tactic than the usual sign the house over etc, etc.

But, correct me if I am wrong, Paul, but the term is fixed and you might not be brown bread – just old, sick, unable to look after yourselves etc etc…..

Most equity release schemes are in effect a life time mortgage, the variance is, some rely on the property sale to clear the mortgage, there are also schemes where the owner pays interest only on the mortgage, but they are both as it says on the tin, life time not fixed term.

The high moral tone some have adopted here amuses me. People are actually upset that HMRC is not getting its “fair share” as they would have it.

The upshot of the case is that all of us will pay more but will any of us see the benefit from the increased tax received? Not a chance.

I also sense that there is some confusion between the VAT corporations pay and the Corporation Tax they pay. VAT is a tax added to the value of what we all buy – like the old pre-EU purchase tax. In the case of VAT the seller collects the tax from the buyer and transfers it to the Treasury. Whether the seller levies the tax at 3% or 20% it is of no benefit to the seller.

I don’t think it’s so much a high moral tone as the reality that HMRC need the revenue, anyone managing to dodge paying by any means (legal or otherwise) merely transfers the problem on to other shoulders.

As to whether we will benefit, must admit my cynical head tends to agree with yours.

It does allow the seller to sell at a lower price against those purely British based, that’s the sellers advantage.

Yes, but now some people like to try something in the shop and then buy it cheaper on-line!

Sure, but without shops, then what?

Any junk mail with a reply envelope included, gets sent back with added junk.

My answer phone is permanently on.

Done that, worked perfectly, I started receiving booklets featuring and advertising pornographic literature, claimed to be as a result of response to some ad, their particular wrinkle was to give a phone number to call should you wish to stop this mailing, which was of course a premium rate number, I managed to add two pieces of roofing slate to the package and returned, don’t know what it cost at other end but mailing ceased