The Wage Slaves Escape Manual

Financial wisdom I wish I’d known at 22

I bought my first house at 22, took out a mortgage, made my first investment in shares and started my first job. Here's what I wish someone had told me then

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Property ownership: a safe bet or housing roulette?

It's one of the great tragedies of the last decade that a very simple human need - to have a roof over your head and a safe place to live - has become such a game of housing roulette.

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Why it is better to rent a house than to buy

Housing market bulls will point to the great gains made in house prices over the past five years. That's great if you already had a home, and you bought in the right area. But lots of college leavers can't afford a bedsite, never mind a decent flat, and you could have replicated that kind of capital increase if you had picked the right shares on the stock market.

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Pic ‘n’ mix politics leaves a bitter taste

So we finally saw the details of the Lib-Con pact – a Faustian bargain for the 21st century. What a mess it was – rises in VAT and National Insurance and the starting rate of income tax raised t0 £10,000 to keep the Liberals happy. And the Tories were forced to ditch their stated wish of increasing the threshold at [...]

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Why the housing market has further to fall

Hung Parliament, public sector job cuts, looming unemployment, political uncertainty. Does anyone really think we are on the brink of a new housing boom? Economists and realists in the housing industry are now starting to acknowledge that the return to house price growth that they were predicting last autumn is unlikely to materialise. There are [...]

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