I don't agree with that - owning your own home has always been an aspirational thing - I bet you haven't always rented!!

If you rent you will pay until you die and have no assets to show for your money at least if you buy a house you have an asset at the end of the mortgage, that situation didn't suddenly change with Maggie.

Repeating it three times doesn't make your argument any stronger

What did change with Maggie was the advent of negative equity.

So much for always having an asset at the end of the mortgage.

Maggie didn't invent negative equity it has always existed.

There will be very few people who will experience negative equity if they are able to see the mortgage out to its logical conclusion.

No it was the advent of the endowment mortgage, which when combined with ' slick ' salespitch and stupid customer resulted in negative equity

" Yes madam, at the end of the term you will get cash back " , but only if the interest rates remain the same, when they dropped and people werent paying as much they still expected the same end return

I have spent hours trying to explain it to my in laws

The point was the insurance policy was supposed to deliver sufficient to clear the purchase price.

Or simply sell the house to pay off the original loan and use 25 years worth of equity to buy another place for cash, possibly smaller but there lies the gamble - as you say, if you can see out the loan you will not be in negative equity.

We're in the final phase of this now, just waiting for the equity in this house to match the cash price of our final home, got the area sussed and the house style, when the two match like the wheels of a fruit machine then we're off, too many consider their house to be sacrosanct and unsellable because its "home", no it isn't, its a tool to be traded until you owe no-one.

It did, providing the original monthly payment was made, but interest rates dropped and so did the payments being made ( the interest only part of the mortgage ) so instead of putting that ' saving ' aside or re investing, people spent the saving

An endowment mortgage consists of an insurance policy and an interest only mortgage, that is where people got confused, it only works if they are used together with the original price

Hilarious how Clegg has just unearthed his social conscience.
Danny Alexander is a wholly unappealing MP.

I couldn't believe him dissing the Tories over the EU referendum plans on TV this morning, based on them saying "it will happen some day" against his plan of "it will happen when there's a change to an EU treaty" (so effectively, someday). Does he think it makes him sound better and cleverer?

The only way he's going to restore any credibility, and it's a long shot, is for him and his party to walk away from the coalition now and vote against everything (within reason) so the Tories can't govern effectively for 6 months or so.

The longer he stays in bed with them, the worse the situation will get for the country as there'll be pre election fights all over, and unless he and they show some backbone, they'll get wiped out in May.

And the less said about Alexander the better.

Uncle Vince is alive and well.

rlit's time Wince, I'll pay for the air farerl

I haven't had a mainstream business since Vince was pulled out of the lucky dip as Business Secretary so I'm not up to speed with what he has done for businesses in his term of office but judging by his comment that the banks are still not doing enough for small businesses and that finance is still hard to source for those small businesses then I'd guess that he hasn't done that much at all really - it was the first and foremost burning issue to be solved in 2010 and banks were financed and refinanced on the proviso that they would oil the wheels of small industry - sounds like they didn't do enough oiling for Vince's liking so he's still moaning about it five years later - five years is a bloody long time for a small business to trip and stagger through month-by-month without the right finance in place.