THE SOCIAL ENTERPRISE IDEA TO REVOLUTIONISE THE HOUSING MARKET WITH YOUR SUPPORT

Anyone interested in  setting up a housing co-operative to buy housing to then rent to our members along the lines of the idea below ?

 

My idea is to simply set up an organisation which would continuously seek crowdfunding  for redeemable shares offering (at present) about 3-4% which would be used to purchase rentable homes. The redeemable shares would enable savers currently offered laughable savings rates by the banks to be able to use this as a safe and reliable method of  savings offering much better returns than banks.

 

The tenants to which these homes would be rented  would also share in the profit their rent ultimately generates as it pays off the purchase cost. The whole idea is to enable the tenants to build up a sum of money from the profits of the organisation for them to use as a deposit to buy their own home.

 

If the funds borrowed to 100% fund the purchase are fully repaid by means of charging rent, at the end of a term similar to an average type of mortgage of, say 25 years, then at that point the organisation would own the asset outright. It would obviously then be able to offer a portion of the value of that asset to the tenant.

 

This portion would accrue from the moment the tenant commences paying rent and would be available to the tenant whenever he leaves  which could be at any time. He does not have to remain any longer than any initial short tenancy.

 

The tenant would always be paying a ‘market’ rent the same as any other tenant. But he would be getting something back that no other tenant ever does. He will be getting back a portion of the rent he has paid which he can then use as his deposit to go and buy his own home with an ordinary mortgage if he so wishes.

 

Instead of just paying rent to line a landlord’s pocket, tenants would get something back so their rent would be not completely wasted money dow the drain as it normally is for all tenants.

 

This model would thus enable a person with no capital whatever to accrue a deposit for their own home purchase, or even use this organisation to end up either a long leaseholder on  low rent if he wished to remain in the property. It could almost be viewed as a means of just turning an ordinary rental into a (different) type of mortgage for the ultimate purchase of a home. A mortgage where no deposit is needed at all. It’s just a rental that eventually just turns into actual home ownership.

 

It offers a means of home ownership which dis-enfranchises no-one and whereby any tenant turns progressively into an owner.

 

If set up as the legal concept of a Co-op, it is legally allowed to ask the public to invest in redeemable shares which  would pay an interest rate which might currently be 3-4%.

 

This is just a brief description of the idea, obviously there is a lot of detail to ramble on about, but I’ll leave that for  the moment as it isn’t needed until people want to know more and join.

 

Oh, by the way. I have spent a lot of time doing all the maths and the idea does work. You can have a look for yourself if you are interested & contact me.

 

With the help of the crowdfunding crowd, we can cut the legs of those greedy bankers and eventually take all their mortgage business away from them so that every penny people pay to live in a home goes directly towards actually paying for that home and not the huge profits for  greedy bankers.

 

This idea has wings; it could take off and fly !

 

 

 

 

 

HORSHAM COUNCIL CORRUPT SPENDING OF TAXPAYERS MONEY

Councils spend £100m on taxpayer-funded credit cards

By Heidi Blake, and Conrad Quilty-Harper of THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 9:31PM BST 27 May 2011

Horsham Council in West Sussex spent £1150 on two llamas to graze on communal land along with a small flock of sheep. They also spent £575 on live fish for a council pond.

Councils have spent tens of millions of pounds on taxpayer-funded credit cards with local authority executives and councillors treating themselves to first-class travel to foreign destinations and stays in five-star hotels, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Despite being ordered to cut spending by almost 30 per cent, town hall chiefs have continued to lavish hundreds of thousands of pounds on dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants, leisure trips and expensive gifts including iPads and video games while slashing jobs and scrapping front-line services.

An investigation by The Daily Telegraph has uncovered details of apparently questionable spending decisions by councillors and local government officials, with more than £2 million spent on travel over the last three years, including flights to Thailand, Kenya and Bermuda.

Documents obtained by this newspaper show that the councils also spent £2m on hotel bills, including stays at the famous Four Seasons in New York, the five-star Pan Pacific in Singapore, and the Athens Hilton.

Hospitality bills totalling £2.6m were paid on the cards, including dinners at Claridges, one of Britain’s most expensive hotels, hog roasts and champagne receptions, as well as tens of thousands of pounds spent booking tables at award ceremonies.

A total of another £500,000 was spent on gifts such as Tiffany jewellery, Gucci products and pure silk ties, while online shopping sprees racked up bills of more than £300,000 at Argos and £150,000 at Amazon.

Read the rest of this article here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/council-spending/8542909/Councils-spend-100m-on-taxpayer-funded-credit-cards.html

The biggest lie in British politics

by freelance Journalist Johann Hari

British politics today is dominated by a lie. This lie is making it significantly more likely you will lose your job, your business, or your home. The lie gives a false explanation for how we came to be in this crisis, and prescribes a medicine that will worsen our disease. Yet it is hardly being challenged – except by some of the world’s most distinguished Nobel Prize winning economists.

Here’s the lie. We are in a debt crisis. Our national debt is dangerously and historically high. We are being threatened by the international bond markets. The way out is to eradicate our deficit rapidly. Only that will restore “confidence”, and therefore economic growth. Every step of this program is false, and endangers you.

Let’s start with a fact that should be on billboards across the land. As a proportion of GDP, Britain’s national debt has been higher than it is now for 200 of the past 250 years. Read that sentence again. Check it on any graph by any historian. Since 1750, there have only been two brief 30-year periods when our debt has been lower than it is now. So we can afford to run a deficit, if that has a positive effect – which we’ll get to in a minute. If we are “bust” today, as George Osborne has claimed, then we have almost always been bust. We were bust when we pioneered the Industrial Revolution. We were bust when we ruled a quarter of the world. We were bust when we beat the Nazis. We were bust when we built the NHS. Or is it George Osborne’s economics that are bust?

Our debt is not high by historical standards, and ………

BENEFITS MADNESS

REMOVING BENEFITS FROM THE UNEMPLOYED TO FORCE THEM INTO WORK

government creating a wandering homeless horde of penniless beggars and outcasts

Most unemployed people would jump at the chance to have a job – if they could get one – which paid them more than the total amount they received in State benefits.

The problem is you have to have a job paying at least about £21 000 or even more, just to equal the amount the State might be paying an unemployed person, possibly with a child to look after. There just aren’t enough jobs out there that pay more than £21 000.

Unemployed people at the very bottom of the pile, those, badly educated by a useless State education system, and lacking in social skills or any other skills, are expected to take on jobs paying the minimum wage or even less. The minimum wage pays about £240 a week before tax, perhaps about £1300 a year, before tax.

A two bedroomed flat in a grubby part of the South East of England might typically cost £800 a month at the lowest and grubbiest end of the housing market. At a rent of £9600 a year that leaves £3400 a year to live on and pay for everything else. It is £65 a week – almost exactly what the unemployment benefit for a single person is.

Ian Duncan Smith’s crazy scheme to force the supposedly work-shy army of unemployed people back into work by removing their benefits for three years is completely bonkers.

Duncan Smith and the Government thinks people on benefits don’t work because they don’t want to work. That is a parody of the truth. Most people on benefits don’t work because they cannot get a job which pays them enough to live on and possibly a bit extra left over for a bit of fun out of life as well as just work. They work like a shot in the ‘black’ or hidden economy because it pays well.

The real problem is that because successive Governments have meddled so much in people’s lives and distorted the entire economy with a vast array of restrictive and expensive interferences, that same economy has steadily become poorer and poorer. It is now a basket case weakly tottering around, wheezily grasping for something to prop it up before it collapses completely.

Employers no longer offer workers wages which are sufficient to live on as employers know the Government will pay their workers benefits to subsidise the inadequately low wages workers are now expected to accept from employers.

It is ridiculous that our Government subsidises employers in this way. Make no mistake, it IS the employers being subsidised, not the workers.

And the this is the reason why millions of new jobs (at the lowest, impossible to live on level) have been created, only for 70 per cent of them to be taken up by a horde of immigrants from third world countries who think all their Christmases have arrived at once when they earn in a day in the UK what takes them at least a month in their own countries.

So, the insane stupidities of successive Governments have effectively imported the Third World into the UK, making us all poorer and the UK more and more like a Third World country as each sorry year blunders by.

Another myth that is being peddled is that it is such a good idea for a UK business to pay people like the Chinese to make things cheaply to be sold here in the UK.

Being made so cheaply, it is said, means the UK business (not, obviously a manufacturer any more as that is now being done by the Chinese) can sell the items more cheaply on the UK market, giving a better deal to the consumer as well as making more money for themselves.

It does seem that way at first glance. But it isn’t really true because as more and more people lose their jobs in the UK as more and more things are ‘outsourced’ to be made or done abroad, there are fewer and fewer people with less and less money in the UK available to buy items made abroad.

That is why David Cameron is desperately trying to persuade the Chinese to pay US more of their own money by buying more things from us because at the moment we import three times as much from China as they buy from us.

The fact is real wealth is not money but jobs, and the ability of jobs to make things of value. Money is only something conveniently used to measure the real value of goods and services, i.e. jobs and people’s labour and what those jobs create.

If we give even a small part of our wealth away by using our money to give to other countries for them to employ their own citizens at slave wage levels as in China and India, then we create more and more unemloyment and poverty in our own country.

London School of Economics Lecture on Fractional Reserve Banking

This invitation I received makes interesting reading. Have a look; and do feel free to go along to the lecture yourself if you would like to. Just contact Bill Dyson at info@positivemoney.org.uk.

Hayek lecture

Date: Thursday 28 October 2010
Time: 6.30-8pm

Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London
WC2A 2AE

Tel: +44 (0)20 7405 7686

Speaker: Professor Jesús Huerta de Soto

A growing number of people are realising that our current money system, which gives commercial banks a monopoly on the supply of money to the economy and throws much of the population into unnecessary debt, is defective and urgently needs reforming. On Thursday 28th October 2010 the following lecture is being held at the typically mainstream London School of Economics, and is worth attending if you’re in the area. It’s free.

Prof Huerta de Soto comes from the Austrian school of economics, which has a very unique approach to the analysis of money, and which you may or may not agree with. We’re particularly interested in this:

“Prof Huerta de Soto will also unveil his proposal for similar legislative change that the “Peel Act” or Bank Charter Act of 1844 achieved with regards to the over issue of promissory notes to gold, but with respect to the over issue of credit. The consequences of doing this should create a climate of financial stability and an opportunity to totally restructure the national debt (potentially pay it off).”

The 1844 Act made it illegal for commercial banks to issue their own bank notes. Prior to the Act, the banks had been issuing so many bank notes that they caused inflation and destabilised the economy (this should sound familiar). Unfortunately the legislation never made it illegal for banks to create the digital numbers in your bank account. Since then, digital money has become 97% of all the money in the economy. Between 2000 and 2009 alone, banks created £1.2 trillion of this digital money – a major contributing factor to the house price boom and subsequent bust.

The Positive Money team believe this loophole was at the root of the financial crisis, and needs to be dealt with urgently, so we’re very keen to see what Prof de Soto is going to say on Thursday 28th October.

Full details are here:

If you’re going, let us know (reply to this email) and we can all meet up for a post-lecture drink.

Ben Dyson, on behalf of the Positive Money team.

Positive Money
107 Fleet Street
London, – EC4A 2AB

Email address is: info@positivemoney.org.uk

Copyright (C) 2010 Positive Money All rights reserved.

Further information

The current financial and economic situation of the world should be analysed from the point of view of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory as developed by Mises and Hayek. Professor Huerta De Soto will present innovative solutions to the banking crisis and credit crunch working within the tradition of the Austrian School masters, Mises and Hayek. He will also unveil his proposal for similar legislative change that the “Peel Act” or Bank Charter Act of 1844 achieved with regards to the over issue of promissory notes to gold, but with respect to the over issue of credit. The consequences of doing this should create a climate of financial stability and an opportunity to totally restructure the national debt (potentially pay it off).

Should you wish to get an advanced feel for the subject of the lecture, you can look at Chapter 9 of this book by Huerta De Soto, which can be downloaded from The Cobden Centre, the pdf is called “Huerta de Soto, Jesus: Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles. This chapter gives the theoretical outline of part of the lecture.

Jesús Huerta de Soto is professor of political economy at King Juan Carlos University.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. For any queries email events@lse.ac.uk or call 020 7955 6043.

LIFE IN BRITAIN BECOMING NIGHTMARE – Our nanny state and officious councils

Big Brother Watch Newsletter – 19th February 2010

please consider adding info@bigbrotherwatch.org.uk to your safe senders list

The past seven days have seen a slew of stories involving baffling regulations and ludicrous decisions from health and safety officers in councils around the country. The absurdity began last weekend, when a 67 year-old man was prevented from getting a bus because he was carrying a pot of paint. This was followed by the news that a mother is facing a fine after a litter warden ‘caught’ her toddler dropping a piece of banana from his pushchair. Whilst relieved that the offending council was not Sandwell, we were reminded of our success with Vanessa Kelly and have offered our support to the unfortunate mother in question.

Continuing the theme, it emerged yesterday that Leicestershire County Council are currently in the process of banning swimming goggles, for the bizarre reason that they ‘reduce peripheral vision’. But the crowning glory in this sorry sequence comes courtesy of the chilling ‘National Child Measurement Programme’ – a government programme to catalogue the health of our nation’s youth and hold it on a database, ready to bombard parents if their children get overweight. If this level of snooping wasn’t bad enough, the rigid indicators of the scheme were revealed yesterday, when the parents of apparently healthy Lucy Davies were told that their 5 year-old daughter was fat and at risk of heart disease.

The saddest feature of the nanny state is that it breeds jobsworths who think that everything’s their business; they think that they should play the role of parents and they think it’s fine to deny individual choice in more and more ways. On all counts, they’re wrong.

Blogs of the Week

Edinburgh Council send support workers on snooping classes – the disturbing news that Edinburgh City Council has decided that its social workers should be the first to be trained to see terrorism in everything. Instead of helping the most disadvantaged they will now be watching out for ’empty bottles of bleach’…tragic

“Bomb threat” on Twitter…? Oh, please... – Paul Chambers, the man who tweeted his frustration at the closure of an airport and found himself in custody, goes to court today. Big Brother Watch is hoping that the court sees sense…

Interested in campaigning against body scanners? Click here – An Essex man’s grassroots movement starts piling up signatories on Facebook. Sign up and register your opposition to the full-body scanner.

Media Coverage

BBC Radio Derby – Dylan Sharpe interviewed by Shane O’Connor

East Coast FM – Alex Deane interviewed by Graeme Logan

Daily Echo – Neighbours to turn each other in for bin fines in Southampton
Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The powers being granted to the Bin Stasi should be opposed by the people of Southampton. Bureaucrats everywhere are using the environment as an excuse to intrude on our lives and increase council revenue and it shouldn’t be allowed – especially when disproportionately applied to trivial and absurd ‘offences’ like leaving one’s bin in the wrong place.”

Four Ways to Help Big Brother Watch

1. Forward this newsletter to a friend to let them know about our work, and encourage them to sign up to the mailing list

2. Please do send us your own examples of the Big Brother state or any stories you have seen in your local paper our contact details are available here

3. Donate to the campaign here

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