vision

How YOU can help achieve affordable rent

/ Minimalist Christian / 6 Comments

Rents are too high. A single person over the age of 21 on minimum wage of £6.50 an hour will earn around £1000 a month, less deductions. Even with the lowest rent prices, half of that will go on rent leaving around £120 a week for everything else.

Here’s a painless way to get rent down. It just needs some visionary people with a little capital to decide to do something about it.

Here is an example:
£60,000 invested in a building society or bank will be doing well to make 3% interest (although a ‘help to buy’ ISA can give 4%) e.g http://www.halifax.co.uk/savings/?WT.ac=SNCA1012

Therefore a good (4%) return on that £60,000 is £2400 a year, or £200 a month.
If we are happy with a 4% return on our savings, then why not but a property and rent it out at the same return?

The cheapest (1 bedroom) property available today is £395 a month. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-56267795.html

There is a flat for sale in Rugby for £60,000. (http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-54091703.html?premiumA=true )

Using the £60,000 to buy the property, we could charge a very fair rent of (say) £250 a month, offering a low rental price and getting a very good return on the investment. (£250 instead of £200 to include an allowance for maintenance and fees)..

This represents a saving of a third on the lowest rental cost, and would give someone on low income the chance of an improved standard of living, and maybe even the chance to save enough to put down a deposit on a house of their own.

And all of this giving the same (or better) return that we get from the building society. Maybe there is a little more risk – but there is the benefit of doing something personally to help the current difficult situation for the poor in our town.

If enough of us do this, then it might even cut the overall rental market price (supply and demand!) with wider benefits.  I know that not everyone can help in this way, but some can, and it makes a difference to each person who is helped.

If you are interested and want to take it further, I’m happy to share my experience so far (I have made use of a legacy from when my mother died to do this). Please get in touch privately.

rent

Time to ditch Jack Sparrow’s moral compass?

/ Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

I read a headline this morning that the UK government is paying strip clubs and lap dancing bars thousands of pounds to employ young people.  http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/article1376579.ece What sort of moral compass are they travelling by.  It is Jack Sparrow’s compass: it points at whatever you feel like.

Many of the young people I meet today have already succumbed to the temptations of smoking (tobacco and weed), drinking (to excess), internet pornography and instant gratification sex.  Many have anger management problems, are bored easily, struggle to see any purpose in life, and find it hard to get and keep jobs.  And I live in ‘middle England’, I can’t imagine what it is like in the most deprived areas.

Who can blame them?

We have structured our society so that we take our children away from their parents and put them in schools where the only adult interaction is focused on learning facts that will help them pass exams.  We have structured our economy such that parents have to work long hours, often at weekends, so our less affluent families have little time for child parent interaction.  We have so regulated schools with ‘child protection’ that the few adults who do interact with children are not allowed even to touch them, and who live in fear of accusation of child molesting. We have done our best to mock and marginalise religious institutions who try to suggest that some form of restraint might be beneficial.

We have put our children in an institutional ‘Lord of the Flies’ scenario, and added the instant gratification of TV, internet, and readily available drugs (legal and illegal).

Surely it is time for a serious rethink.

Instead of sticking plaster politics and abdicating any vision of the future to ‘market forces’, let’s try to define what we want society to be like, and then see what needs to be done to get there.

Please share your ideas of what an ideal society would look like.