Richard Baum

I have today placed an offer to buy a house in the ward which is both lovely and ludicrously unaffordable. The offer was gleefully accepted by the current owner who, if you find a quiet spot, you will be able to hear cackling like a maniac and jangling with shiny coins as he runs to the bank.

The same bank, no doubt, which delights in charging me not only thrice the price of the house in interest over the next 25 years, but also a four figure “arrangement” fee for the mortgage, and then £300 on top as an “administration” fee whenever I decide to leave their care.

Over the next 2 years I will pay £31,000 to the bank, of which £23,000 will be interest.

It’s absolutely ridiculous, and unfortunately for a blog that depends on my verbosity to continue, I am genuinely lost for words.

And of course we have no alternative. If they asked me to empty out my pockets, stand on an upturned bucket and hum the French national anthem through a kazoo for the mortgage, I’d have to do it.

And yet such is the lure of home ownership that we claw and gouge and spit and scream our way to the front of the queue for this blatant daylight robbery with smiling acceptance, rather than the mass taking-to-the-streets-with-ceremonial-swords violent protests that any right-thinking society would instigate without delay.

Charlatans the lot of them, these bankers. All they have is lots of money that I don’t. And resultantly they have me in an inescapable financial death-hold. The alternative is to pay someone else’s mortgage in rent.

And the government’s HIPs seem to be an absolute joke. I still need a survey, at a cost of £500+, because apparently mortgage companies don’t trust them! So the seller has to get one, and the buyer has to get one too! Anyone involved in property purchasing is just signing away countless hundreds of pounds for nothing! We may as well hand over their bank details to the government and let them take care of it!

I might just post them my bank details now…

Rick