The grumpy thread

[vulgalour]

I'll just reinforce that ignoring or hiding depression is a BAD THING, and I speak from personal experience.

 

In happier news, I got some tinker time in on the Renault after what seems like forever and while I didn't get a lot done, it felt good to do some work on the old wreck.

[Station]

Just apples or a banana? Now when you can manage to eat a roast dinner walking down the street you'll know you've got it sorted.

 

Strangely with all my hang-ups that's one I've never had; although I do know a few people who suffer with it. I'm quite happy eating on my own in public, in cafes, pubs, restaurants, or a bag of chips on a bench in the park, my quirk is that I have to sit facing out, I find it very hard to sit eating with my back to people.

Just about anything, I don't think about it anymore - I never really get anxious about anything, interviews, meeting new people, etc.

[HillmanImp]

Bollocks. I was just reading this shit on here and missed my son taking his first steps on his own downstairs. 

[jakebullet]

Forgot to mention, get thee to https://www.meetup.com/find/ and find a local mentals group. It takes courage to turn up and say I'm a mentals, but once you do knowing the other people are also mental makes things feel 'easier'. I'd suggest you go for one of the ones that goes out and does things, not the sit in a pub and discuss being mental type.

 

I met the beautiful Kinky Girl at one of these groups. She sat next to me at the first one I went to, and I pretty much ignored her 'cos the fear. But it worked out eventually, and I also gained real human friends which is most surprising for a spacker like me.

[beko1987]

Bollocks. I was just reading this shit on here and missed my son taking his first steps on his own downstairs.

Sorry...

[meggersdog]

The mention of Holkham has just reminded me.I went there on Sunday and some of you will know parking is down Lady Anne's drive.This is a single track (private) road where you park either side,generally 90-ish degrees to the road.At weekends it's quite busy with families milling about all over the road,dogs without leads,horse riders and cyclists  all seemingly oblivious to their surroundings.There are cars driving up and down this track pulling over to let others pass.Basically you have to have your wits about you when driving (slowly) down this single track road.

So after a fairly long walk from the beach to the car I'm sat in my car having a drink before setting off home.Another car pulls out of a parking space a few cars away and the driver is on his phone.This twat is so out of control his wife is leaning over adjusting the steering whilst he is making this ever so important phonecall.Why this utter f**king twat could not stay parked whilst on the phone I don't know.Looked like the couple were in their sixties so he really should have known better.It always takes around ten minutes to get to the road anyway so taking a phonecall while your wife is steering from the passenger seat was an accident waiting to happen.

Owning a smartphone does not make you smarter.Quite the opposite from what I've seen.

[r.welfare]

Looking forward* to getting my wife's car back from the garage at the end of the week. It's been off the road for nearly 4 weeks after refusing to start at the supermarket, would turn over but not catch. Recovery man diagnosed fancy keyless fob no longer talking to immobiliser. That'll be a main dealer job, thinks I, so instruct him to tow it to local Nissan agent. This is on a Wednesday.

 

Local Nissan agent says we can't look at it until Monday. I lend Espace to wife and take train to work. Monday comes and goes. I ring Nissan. "The battery is now flat and we don't have any so we are charging it, keys will be recoded tomorrow morning no problem". Tuesday morning turns into afternoon. I ring Nissan. "We've recoded the keys but it's still not starting and it's turning over like it has no compression, can we have your permission to spend half an hour taking the valve cover off?". I agree. 5.30pm looms. 4 hours to take off a rocker cover? I ring Nissan...

 

"Your timing chain is slack, you have three options sir - throw the car away, we can fit a new engine (we don't do reconditioned on this model) for 5 grand or you can take it somewhere else". It's a six year old Qashqai so option 1 is taking the piss, as is option 2. So I pay them £180 for their time (1.5hrs labour!) and get it transported (another £60) to my usual garage, where I am beginning to realise it should have gone in the first place...

 

Later that afternoon I go down and it's already in the bay. They think the tensioner might have gone as the timing seems to be out - one cylinder has 165psi compression but the others are around 50. I am told this is good as zero compression would result from bent valves. They don't think chain is slack but propose changing chain, sprockets, tensioners, guides etc before retiming and seeing what's what.

 

A week passes; I know they are always busy (a good sign because it's all word of mouth/repeat business) and I'm in India for work anyway. I give them a bell and they say the timing chain kit doesn't come with the right exhaust cam sprocket, which has to be ordered from Nissan in Japan and this takes five days...

 

Another week passes. The part arrives but now they are busy again. I get fed up with the train and borrow my brother's 323Ci. I like it so much I don't want to give it back. Meanwhile my wife complains the electric handbrake won't release sometimes in the Espace. She is wrong - something is occasionally jamming up the gear mechanism so she can't get 1st or 2nd, leading her to pull away in 3rd. The burning smell is the clutch...I dismantle half the engine bay and fish out a broken cable tie from around one of the gear cables.

 

Yesterday I get a call. The news is not good. It's all timed up, they twist the column switch and...it's still turning over like it's got no compression. They're fed up. Mrs W hates the Espace. The only person happy is me - this BMW I am driving is ace - but nagging the back of my mind is that the music will stop soon.

 

Today I get a call. The mystery is solved. The reason the car would not start? The throttle body has seized shut. This is good. Except it isn't. A new one is £700. On top of the £800 for the new timing chain, sprockets, tensioners, guides etc and labour. This is a lot of money. I have it, but rather would spend it on something else. Like a 323Ci.

 

Suddenly it all makes sense. The recovery man mentioned a throttle position sensor fault code, but dismissed that as a byproduct of repeated cranking. The cretins at Nissan wiped the codes. And my trusted garage worked on the (incorrect) diagnosis from Nissan. The new chain etc isn't really wasted because the car has done nearly 140k.

 

There are many learnings. Modern cars and main dealers live up to their reputation. But also Renault Espaces are really reliable cars, if you periodically remove obstacles from the gear linkage. I don't know what it all means. But I do know I am keeping the bloody Nissan as long as possible to amortise the cost. And my wife's next car will be <£2000. And my brother is giving me first refusal on the BMW.

[Timewaster]

DTCM, Maybe you could write down how you feel and take it to the GP.

When they ask you what's wrong simply tell then it's hard for you to explain and hand them the paper.

I'm sure they will be okay with that.

 

GLWTGP

[mercrocker]

I find this helps when I get a bit moody...... 

 

 

[panhard65]

A really minor grump, but when someone is daft enough to list an '05 mini convertible with a blown engine for 350 quid buy it now. Why does some penniless twat decide to bid on it hoping to get it cheaper. It's been listed for 45 mins and is already over 350 I was hoping for a bargain there !!!! will probably make over a grand even with the buggered engine.

[vulgalour]

I'm getting pretty grumpy at the 40+ age group lately.  Not all of them, obviously, but a certain segment of them.  Being asked why I'm bothering to look after a rented house is pretty insulting.  "Why bother, you don't own it, you're just making money for someone else."  Er, what?  I have to live here, probably for years, and I can't afford to buy because house prices and mortgages are so ridiculously far from my means even for the smallest shittiest house there is.  "Why don't you just stop paying rent and get a mortgage?"  is brilliant too, even if you try and explain to them how money works.  My favourite statement so far though "Well, I didn't have any problem buying a house."  No, that's because you bought before the gross inflation of housing costs and are now preaching about how nice it is to have a nest egg investment because your house is worth so much more than when you bought it and isn't that wonderful.

 

Why don't I just go out and buy a house?  You.  That's why.  You spoiled it for me.  Now go away so I can enjoy looking after this house I don't own in peace and quiet and try not to think too hard about just how much I've been screwed over to be in my mid-thirties with no alternative employment options, savings and worries that I'll never be able to retire as I shan't have a pension and the NHS will have been privatised and everything will be the dystopian nightmare science fiction promised.

[beko1987]

I feel your pain vulgalour. "just save for a deposit" yea, saving the £23.46 I have left every month before even thinking of working on the car to get me to work will go really well...

 

Its why I've adapted the 'I don't mind renting' personal, cos there's probably nothing else I can do. I'll just keep paying £825 to live in a £248k terraced 2 bed house and keep a roof over my kids heads thx! Again, usually said to someone who bought their house in 1982 and has a company car with fuel card...

[MarvinsMom]

i do feel you pain, there was something on the radio the other day that said the average deposit for a mortgage was £33,000 

 

like, WTF??

 

i bought mine 20-odd years ago it was £2500, and another £100 for the arrangement fee.... and that was hard enough to save up.

 

the young-uns today, unless you have a bank of mam and dad to fall back on then its just not going to happen.

 

i blame that sarah beeny woman for relentlessly push "buy-to-let" and "property development" as a quick buck,"investment" instead of what a house really is, some where to fuggin' live!

[scaryoldcortina]

I agree too, it's completely insane! I'm lucky that I bought when I did - we wanted out of council, didn't like the insecurity of private renting and couldn't get a mortgage (self employed) so I found the cheapest 3 bed house that could be moved into (in the Supermart yellow free ads of all places!) and hit my parents up for a loan. I reckon for my £15k investment in 1995 I've saved almost 100k in rent (based on the 100pw next door rents out at).

 

Downside is both my kids are in their 20s and have no prospect of moving out any time soon. It isn't a big house!

[HillmanImp]

i do feel you pain, there was something on the radio the other day that said the average deposit for a mortgage was £32,000

 

like, WTF?

TBH, now is the time to buy if you can muster a deposit together. Lots of places are doing 95% mortgages. Okay, the rates are not as good as an 80% mortgage but with the banks panicking over Brexit they will be keeping the interest rates low so you don't have to worry about the payments shooting up in the next couple of years. The worry of rates shooting up abd the house becoming unaffordable is low.

 

http://www.money.co.uk/mortgages/95-mortgages.htm

 

I know a 5% mortgage is still a fair bit, with legal fees you are still looking at about £7.5k to get a £125k house but its better than the £26k I had to pay in 2010 as there were no competitive mortgages accepting less than a 20% deposit.

 

The only worry with a small deposit is if the house price falls and remortgaging/selling at the end of the term but that will always be a gamble with housing.

 

p.s. I am 39 until later this month.

 

*just edited this as noticed that ithe Barclays one I posted wanted a 10% deposit from family which would be fully refundable wuth interest after 2 years so was actually 15%. Interesting product though.

[beko1987]

Id be happy with a nice Council house, but because both me and amy work, we don't get a look in, despite only just being able to scrape the bills and living costs together

 

Although leaving amy is a tempting prospect sometimes, then she would get a council house, but it would be a few months of being evicted and hell for her and the kids, and I'd be straight back at mums, so I stick with it...

[Kiltox]

A 125k house costs 225k here - that might skew the average deposit slightly

[cobblers]

Other day at work I was talking to one of the younger lads - He's 22 and got an 8k loan to buy a fuckin Harley Davidson about a year ago. At 20% APR cos he just walked into his bank and they said "that's the best he'd get cos of no credit history" stupid really.

A year later he's got a great credit score and he's been living with his mum in a council house for 15 years, he's paid the rent on his own since he was 18. He loves the house, its massive and he's spent about 3k building himself a workshop down the garden etc. Other than the shitty bike loan he's fantastic with money - Saves £400 a month and probably earns about half of what I do and I can barely put anything away.

I put to him that it's be worth him considering just buying it off the council because the mortgage would be half of what they pay in rent, and since they could buy it for 50k instead of the 100k value he could remortgage and pay off his shitty bike loan and still save a ton every month. He's even got a load of money in savings he could use as a deposit.

 

Anyway, 50 year old bloke at work pipes up "Oh Dave you're always trying to talk people into loans, I've never had a loan! I bought my first house outright!!". A few months ago his parents gave him 150k so he could buy a 380k house in order to get one of his kids into a better school. His parents also paid for his first house.

 

His mum never worked and his dad was a manager in a concrete factory.

Things just aren't what they used to be and it's never going to go back to that, sadly.

 

Same goes for my missus grandad. Mid 70s now, retired at 50, was a manager in the coal board. Nice bloke but not especially skilled or talented in any way. - Had 2 kids, wife never worked. Lives in an 800k house, mortgage free and earns more from his pension than I do as an electronic engineer who the company charges £120PH for.

[Jon]

One draw for emigration was the notion that we were being priced out of the property market, back in 2006-ish, or whenever it was that we considered a move to NZ. This may or may not have been the case, as it was probably just as much the life situation at the time and my own feeling of unease of borrowing so much money. 

 

We bought our house five years ago in NZ and although the primary motive was for a place to live in, it seems that it's become an unwittingly shrewd investment. House prices are now on the up locally; previously unsellable places are now sold and were we trying to buy this place now, we'd probably not be able to afford it. However, whereas some are quite happy about all this, it's irrelevant to me, as I won't sell; like I say, it's a home. Plus, the next house we'd buy would have inflated in price by a similar amount, too.

 

It seems therefore that first time buyers are being shat upon and the only people benefiting from high house prices are multiple property owners and those downsizing. i.e. baby boomers, once again. Thing is, our place was our first home, so who could now afford to buy it from us? I'm no economist by any stretch of the imagination but, short of people relying on some historic pot of inheritance cash to hand down to generations through trust schemes, I don't see how effectively removing first time buyers from the housing chain through high house prices is sustainable. Even buy to let investors will have to throw the towel in at some point, since tenants won't be able to pay the rent required to cover costs. 

[Cavcraft]

A really minor grump, but when someone is daft enough to list an '05 mini convertible with a blown engine for 350 quid buy it now. Why does some penniless twat decide to bid on it hoping to get it cheaper. It's been listed for 45 mins and is already over 350 I was hoping for a bargain there !!!! will probably make over a grand even with the buggered engine.

.

 

They're 'spoilers' that's why. There are people out there sad enough to spot stuff they can't afford, then place a bid on it knowing it'll wipe the 'buy it now' price off and wreck it for others. Have a look st the bidding when the listing is finished and you'll often spot this behaviour. Sad wankers.

[Cavcraft]

The recent stupid trend of people saying 'only selling because I've bought another car'

 

And you've only bought another car because...this ones fucked?

[beko1987]

The only place I see the "selling because I've bought another car" line and don't mind is here, usually because the vendor put up a nice collection thread the day/week before!

[Cavcraft]

By the way, all that 'my house only cost me £2,000 in 1963 and is now worth £225,000' stuff would be fine if every other property except yours stayed at 1963 prices.

[bub2006]

Trying to sell xantia. Its a great car with mot till end of year,I've replaced tyre and hopefully sorted leak out. Advertised it on various platforms and no joy bar folk messing about. Not even a Xbox offered from Gumtree.

[purplebargeken]

Swap you a Mars Bar, Twix and a Scotch egg for it.

 

I have a cold. I feel shit

[chaseracer]

The only way Musical Offspring is going to own a house is when he inherits Chaseracer Towers following the departure of self and Domestic Management in six-foot boxes.

 

Re. the other discussion: I sometimes find it incredibly difficult to talk to people in social situations.  This is very odd, considering that I talk for a living, but that seems to be very different.  So - RichardK and others: I apologise - I really wasn't ignoring you at FOTU a couple of weeks ago!

[Captain Furious]

While I don't deny that getting on the housing ladder isn't easy, it also isn't the impossible Herculean mountain climb that many folk make out.

 

The problem, as it often is, is the misplaced sense of entitlement displayed by many of the younger generation, "I can't afford a house because they're all 10 million pounds and you need an 8 million deposit" the problem actually is that they can't afford a house which they think they are worthy of, Ie one like they currently live in with their parents, therefore everything is OMGSOUNFAIR and us 'oldies' (anyone over 35) just don't understand the struggle because we all got our houses for 2 grand when times were easier...blah blah blah.

 

£150k house, 10% deposit, , call it £20k all in by the time you've covered legal fees and moving in, if there is two of you its £10k each. Not an impossible ask.

[cobblers]

Come and live over the road from me. 3 bedroom grade 2 listed house. £65k. Get a 95% mortgage and move in if you can scrape 5K cash.

[beko1987]

Trying to sell xantia. Its a great car with mot till end of year,I've replaced tyre and hopefully sorted leak out. Advertised it on various platforms and no joy bar folk messing about. Not even a Xbox offered from Gumtree.

Ill offer you an xbox, broken laptop and £50 a month? Or swap for my zx, you liked* it when you drove it...

[M'coli]

Chris Amon's dead.