{"id":246,"date":"2011-08-28T18:06:44","date_gmt":"2011-08-28T18:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/?p=246"},"modified":"2023-06-24T10:58:09","modified_gmt":"2023-06-24T09:58:09","slug":"246","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/?p=246","title":{"rendered":"Climbing the ladder with cupcakes and Gaddafi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although the concept of a \u2018starter home\u2019 exists in the US, it is not drummed into Americans that a \u2018forever home\u2019 must eventually be attained, only after working your way through a list of greater fools. The housing situation here is easily my biggest complaint, and yes, I realise the UK could fit inside Texas<\/a> with room to spare. Still, it\u2019s a kind of madness which it may take a non-native to truly appreciate.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nDon’t thank me, I’m an estate agent. It’s my job to fuck everybody.<\/em><\/p>\n

As my DW put it, “What’s intriguing is how people’s minds work.<\/a>”
\nI have a bit of a nuts idea, I’d just like some advice about whether or not it could be done. We are looking to move house and have found a property on the market for \u00a3700,000 our current house is worth roughly \u00a3340k we’d make about \u00a3120k so we’d need a mortgage of \u00a3600k. We do not have a big income at all, I’m a SAHM<\/a> and DH is a teacher. The thing is the property we’re looking at has a swimming pool which the current owners hire out to swim\/dive schools apparently making \u00a33000 a month. They also say that they often turn people down, so it could be possible to make even more income from the pool. This income could therefore cover the mortgage payments. <\/em><\/p>\n

Do you think any bank would lend us the money to buy this house? Or am I being completely stupid? <\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks for any opinions.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Opinions are well and good, but here’s a man with a plan:<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve a solution for this SAHM, that would completely solve her dilemma – get her the house and pay for the upkeep of the swimming pool. It’s delightfully straightforward and the strategy is as good as foolproof.<\/em><\/p>\n

All that’s required is a carefully baked batch of cup-cakes, and a trip to Libya… then feed a bad cup-cake to Gadhafi… and, while he’s choking on the crumbs… claim the $1.7m reward. This currently equates to \u00a31,037,914 – which is sufficient both to buy the new place (with swimming pool); to pay off the mortgage on the old house (which can be let out to cover pool cleaning costs) and plops \u00a3100K in the bank to pay for incidentals.<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s a no-brainer, go-go-cup-cake-baking-for-Gadhafi-capture!<\/em><\/p>\n

The snark is warranted, because once upon a time a bank would probably have quite happily lent them the money<\/a>, and as we seem hellbent on ignoring moral hazard, we all would have contributed to the bailout made necessary by schemes like this spread across a population encouraged to climb at any cost. In any case, the OP has but to reread her own post, bracketed with appropriate warnings.<\/p>\n

Even if it’s just a daydream<\/a> or wind-up, we’ve gotten ourselves into such a state<\/a> that it’s entirely believable someone would give this serious consideration.<\/p>\n

Image credit: DW. (Crummy captioning job, six-years-ago-sam.) That’s me in my neighbour’s pool, before maintenance became a casualty of their shrinking pool of discretionary income and it started blooming algae.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although the concept of a \u2018starter home\u2019 exists in the US, it is not drummed into Americans that a \u2018forever home\u2019 must eventually be attained, only after working your way through a list of greater fools. The housing situation here … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11947,"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/11947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}