Comic Strips

I'm fascinated by how idioms have gone a complete 180. Now we tell people that they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but that idiom is used to describe an impossible task. You can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, it's literally impossible. Same with it's just a few bad apples to excuse bad behaviour. The idiom is a few bad apples ruins the barel, that one bad person or thing jeopardizes the whole thing. I don't get it.

At least she was open to listening, hopefully you've made an impact on her going forward

They really should tax empty houses at 100%. You'll see how fast they will sell, and how low the price will go to achieve that.

Unplugging them from life support is how I read it. I like the darkness.

That is some achievement to lose money on a house in that time period, did it fall down 😂

Those house prices sounds absolutely insane to me.

I'm also in the UK, but I'm in the South East, so house prices are very high. Still managed to find a "cheap" house recently due to the location being a bit rough.

For comparison, my house that I'm buying is £345k (it's 2 bedrooms with a separate garage and 2 bathrooms). I saved up a £125k deposit by living with my parents for the longest time (I think it took me about a decade). The exception being for 3 years when I house shared - the rent was £325 per month with bills included, but my room was effectively a glorified cupboard.

I will also say that I was saving lots and lots of money with my old job. I'm a software developer, so my salary was good (started off at £22.5k, went up to £45k with about 10 years experience and being a senior dev, then our company got bought out and my salary went up to £55k). A year later and I switched jobs as the annual salary increase was £150 (for the whole year). Ended up with a £75k salary w/ bonus, private healthcare, etc etc. I really lucked out at that moment.

As to why I didn't buy a house earlier with my deposit, there was two reasons:

• I had saved up about £100k before for personal savings, then that money went to help a sibling (call this sibling A) with their property. My parents sold a property aborad to effectively give me back the money, but the money was split between me and another sibling's bank account (call this sibling B) because of financial advice given by my uncle. What then happened was sibling B didn't give me back the money and was being incredibly difficult about the money, and since they have a history of being difficult in general, I decided I was going to save that money instead.
• Sibling A wanted to start their own business, but it effectively flopped for all sorts of reasons. They had amassed a loan of £15k, and I helped pay that off. This was while sibling B was being incredibly difficult.
• Main reason: At the time, I didn't know if I really wanted to stay at the job for so long, and if I did want to stay, I didn't want to move into the area where my job was - despite the convenience, the area was incredibly rough - almost GTA like (and that is no exagerration). I didn't know where I wanted to live, and the places I would be interested in, I effectively had no clue as I was living with my parents at the time.

So yeah, buying a house in the South of UK isn't easy at all. It requires a ton of patience and luck.

You bought a house for less than $45K? Excuse me?

For comparison, a 2 bedroom 1 bath house at about 1000 square ft in my area would cost 250K for a place that needs repair and remodeling.