Archive for the 'General' Category
Buying a house involves a mortgage for most people. I have already discussed mortgages and explained that there are two types to consider. There are many financial aspects to take into account when buying a house and it is important to do a monthly budget to see what you can afford and what your main outgoings will be. For example these things may need to be considered: Council Tax, legal fees, water rates, gas and electricity, the mortgage repayments, extra bills like mobile phone/landline costs, internet rates and much more. It is a large commitment and not just the mortgage repayments need to be taken into consideration.
At the moment there are to types of mortgages to choose from with most lenders. You can choose a fixed rate or a variable “tracker” mortgage. The advantage of the fixed rate is that it always remains the same on your repayments. So the interest rate that you pay back to will remain the same over a period of time, usually 2-3 or often 5 year terms.
The tracker mortgage is so called due to the fact it tracks and mimicks the Bank of England rates in which to charge interest. So one month the repayments could be really low and then the next the rates could have risen a lot. Personally I have found that lenders recommend the fixed rate mortgage but it remains to be seen how the Bank of England changes. At the moment we are on an all time low but this will only rise up.
Even though people are buying a lot more houses than half a year ago, the money is not flowing through the economy the way it should. The number of loans rose from 53k to 56k proving that it’s the highest during the six months period, but borrowers are trying to repay the debts as soon as they car therefore net mortgage lending rose only by £900m.
Lending to the biggest British sector: non-finacial private corporations fell by £400m and now it stands very low. Hopefully it will stop falling by the end of the year, because banking really depends on it. In the mean time banks will try to push through to more customers to steadily pull the country from the crisis.
During the last two weeks UK retailers have started switching to private courier companies because of the Royal Mail employees strike. Most of the companies are afraid of consumers stopping to shop online, because of the delays and uncertainty behind Royal Mail. There is no wonder that RM has the best cost-to-service ratio for certain size of parcels, but the increased affection to RM forced retailers to use couriers even though the cost is higher.
On the other hand private couriers are happy to accept any overflow of work to be done that RM cannot do because of the strike and many of these companies are pretty sure that they have won their new clients for good. Definitely next weeks will prove whether this is true or not.
It has already been six months since house prices have started to rise. Very worrying state of the market have left us with uncertainty and continues to grow bad feelings about the economy. Accordingly to the closed watched index, the prices are still on the rise, but slower than during the summer, it’s slowing down. It is still 13.1 per cent form the peak which we have seen in 2007 but experts agree that the marked received a boost after the mortgages have been lowered after October 2007.
The very sluggish improvement in the time needed for the properties to become available on the market also means that there is a slowdown in the constructions area. Maybe this time development companies will learn how to build and finish their jobs properly.
Barclays has started to make some really good moves recently. They already are getting stronger on the market, but this time they were granted a really good deal. Standard Life Bank was bought for much less than analysts expected, just £226m. Specialists estimated that the price the company was bought for its 23 per cent discounted and its standard value would be £293m.
Meanwhile Barclays have spotted a niche in the market for mortgages ad extended the mortgage share on the marked also increasing their profit. The shares fell last Friday by 2.45 per cent while Standard Life Bank share closed down 1.5 per cent.
Source: FT.com
Michael Dell, the owner of the worldwide IT service distribution company has recently announced a calculated bid of 3.9bn to buy Texas neighbours Perot systems. This would help lessen the competition Dell faces and would also help increase the total profit.
It is expected that current employees of Perot would keep their jobs as they already have the revelent training in that industry and it would also keep unemployment numbers down. If Dell become successful in their bid, not only will they be one of the leading IT services worldwide (even more than now) but they would also have a more widespread public following in Texas, where’s now the general public is split between the two companies.
Two of the largest phone companies in the United Kingdom, T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telekom) and Orange (French Telekom) are looking to further their companies by merging as one. They both currently sit behind O2 and Vodafone, with Orange at 3rd and T-Mobile in fourth. By joining together, the net profit is obviously expected to increase and both companies would total their profits 50/50, meaning they would have over 37% of the United Kingdom’s mobile phone user base. This expected statistic would make them the leading phone company in the United Kingdom (being 10% above O2).
The United Kingdom’s third largest mobile phone operator, Orange, has finally managed to exclusively sign a deal with Apple, ( the iPhone’s owners and creators) to sell the iPhone in Britain. This is going to be a massive setback for O2, the United Kingdom’s largest phone company (owning 27%), as they previously were the only company to have the rights.
Profits for Orange are expected to increase vastly and this deal is sure to please current and future Orange customers. The deal was agreed today and the popular Apple phone will be hitting many Orange stores nationwide within the upcoming weeks.
The United Kingdom’s business secretary Peter Mandelson today announced that the car scrappage scheme would now be extended to cover a further 100,000 vehicles. Although this is only a small fraction of the number of cars needed in this scheme, the labour party member has assured that, although they can’t do everything, they can do something.
This scheme helps recycle old metal from unused cars in an attempt to reuse the scraps for new cars. It is expected to rise with the new year, with the labour government promising more and more ‘benefits’ to the general public in the coming weeks.
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