One of the most tedious aspects of the bursting of the property bubble has been the endless bleating that lower house prices are universally bad news.
In fact, lower house prices can be good news for at least two important reasons:
- If you don’t own a house, lower prices mean you (or your children) are more able to afford a home.
- Lower house prices mean extra money to go into more productive and economically useful assets.
You can repeat these facts to homeowners and financial journalists, but the truth bounces off their skulls like moral justice off a banker’s back.
But perhaps they will listen to Warren Buffett?
My weekly roundup from the financial and money blogs and newspapers.
What do you do when you love writing your investing and personal finance blog but it disrupts your work, your weekends, and even your cinema nights?
You start another!
Wait: There is method in my madness. My new site, Stock Tickle, is a very different beast to Monevator.
Let’s not delude ourselves: You’ll have to do or be more to increase your salary.
But you don’t have to change your job. Handy if you love what you do!
Understand that anyone senior to you must be able to justify your raise to someone higher. Therefore, whining or pleading won’t work (not for long). And if your boss is the owner of the company, he or she will be the hardest person to convince – they know that every penny counts.
You do a great job, but you’ve previously been underpaid? Tough, it’s too late to moan now. You lost that fight when you signed up.
I’m serious! You’ve already been pigeonholed and to get the pay you deserve you have to show you can fly – either for the company, or if you must then away from the company.
People have a fetish for smelly, bloody and dangerous occupations where the returns are poor and the competitors numerous.
No, I’m not talking about the British kink for dominatrices.
I mean the warm feeling the public has for manufacturing – and not even the slick, highly-skilled factories that we have in the UK and the US, but the grubby assembly lines that migrated to China.
My regular roundup of the week’s best money blogs and financial articles.
A new feature has emerged from the Monevator labs for those of you who follow the comment discussions on the blog.
Clicking on ‘Discussion’ in the top right corner of any page (between ‘Highlights’ and ‘Archives’) takes you to the new comment page. This page lists all the latest posts to receive comments and the comment authors, as well as an excerpt from their comment. Click on the author’s name to jump to their comment and add your views.
With this new page it’s easy to see if there’s been any more input on the threads you’ve been following. Alternatively, you can find a new discussion. You can still subscribe by email to comments using the tick box below the comment form, too.
