For the rest of us who are not in Craigp's jolly little world
Repossession, repossession, repossession
Every quarter, the Council of Mortgage Lenders publishes figures on the number of repossessions that have taken place, and of late the message has been pretty positive, with the figures regularly being lower than expected.
As a result, people like me can get a little bit complacent about it. After all, the number of properties repossessed in the first half of this year was down 7% on the same period last year. Good news right?
Well yes, but that was still 18,100 properties that lenders took back from borrowers.
And that's just the number of repossessions that actually took place, what about the borrowers who are simply being warned that if things don't improve, they may lose their homes? There are currently 164,500 mortgages where the borrower is in arrears of more than 2.5% of the mortgage balance. Sure, that figure has fallen, but it's still an awful lot of people who are seriously behind on their mortgage payments.
Undoubtedly, some of these people will have no-one but themselves to blame. Perhaps they told a few porky pies in order to get a larger mortgage than they should have, and now the chickens have come home to roost. But equally, plenty of them will simply be victims of circumstance, caught out by an economic crash that was not their fault.
Kicking out tenants
The situation is hardly any better in the rental market.
Social landlords are already reporting a rise in rent arrears following the government's move to reduce housing benefit earlier this year. Meanwhile, research by the Financial Inclusion Centre earlier this year concluded that as many as three million renters are in a vulnerable position, either behind on their rent or struggling to pay it each month.
What's more, with rents continuing their astronomic rise — barely a month goes by without one firm active in the rental market proclaiming a new record high — this is only likely to get worse.
We've never had it so tough
Last year, an adviser to the government, Lord Young, was forced to resign after an interview in which he suggested that as a nation, we had never had it so good (he's back, with his own office in Number 10 now, by the way). A year on, that statement looks even dafter.
Inflation currently stands at a mammoth 5.2%, miles higher than the Bank of England's target of 2%. And our salaries aren't moving upwards at anything like that rate, if at all. Add to that the fact that job security continues to weaken, with unemployment now at a 17-year high, and it becomes clear that pennies have rarely been so tightly stretched. We can't even rely on a return on our cash if we've managed to save in the past, with rates on savings accounts utterly underwhelming.
In fact, for some, it's only the fact that interest rates are so low therefore keeping variable mortgage rates low too, that is keeping things from completely collapsing.
This is the real world at the moment....
