Foreign Perspectives

Between one thing another we didn’t get around to seeing the rally at all yesterday.

The morning went in a bit of a rush to get the rooms sorted out for all the race officials who were staying with us last night. Since they generally book the whole building, we were using a few rooms that hadn’t been used for quite a while which usually turns up a few minor problems that have arisen since their last use. That in turn meant a rush out for a few bits & pieces which took up the afternoon and then we’d to sort out the couple of things that turned up.

They weren’t using our neighbours as a pitstop this year so we didn’t even see the cars there!

Anyway, we’re hoping to get away this morning to see them on the next leg which is just up the road from us.

Perhaps one of the most interesting developments in the mortgage market in recent years is the arrival of chequebook mortgages. That’s interesting in the Chinese sense of the term in their curse “may you live in interesting times”.

A key aspect of a mortgage is that it’s a very, very long term committment. Typically the term is at least 25 years over which time untold numbers of changes to your life and lifestyle can take place. Children can arrive, grow up and leave home over that time, interest rates can go from 5% to 15% to 5% (and have done exactly that in the past), the area in which your house is in can even go from “up and coming” through “marked for demolition” and back to “attractive” (which has happened in areas of Belfast). That’s just the changes that can happen to anyone.

So, as I say, the arrival of chequebook mortgages is “interesting”.

For one thing, 25 years is so long that you just don’t think about arriving at the end of such a period and that, for a mortgage product, is a fatal error to make. Chequebook mortgages actively encourage that kind of thinking in that they effectively give you an overdraft of perhaps £100,000 or even more. It’s all too easy to spend that on the day to day things and find that you’ve absolutely no way to cover the final mortgage payment 25 years down the line.

Ah, but you’ll look at your statements all the time, won’t you? Many people don’t but even for those that do, that 25 year period is just too long to appreciate the problems that can befall you by spending just a little bit too much as you go along.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been getting going on my direct mail campaign aimed at increasing the number of entries on the B&B and self-catering listings sites.

The second use of the mailing list for Scotland pulled in quite a considerable number of properties over the last two weeks. So much so that I’m going to have to implement the planned restructuring of the site well ahead of schedule.

For reasons which escape me, the England mailing hasn’t pulled in anything like the number that Scotland did. Something to explore the reasons for before I do the next one in 2008.

However, for the first time, I’ve targetted Northern Ireland. Early days yet of course, but it looks like the takeup will be relatively low. The size of the mailing was pretty much similar to that for Scotland but, so far, I’ve only received about 1/4 of the response. Still, perhaps some more will come in over the course of the weekend.

They’re just as disorganised as they were last year, at least as far as the non-rally administration goes.

The race officials arrived early this morning before we received details of who is to stay in which room and indeed how many rooms are required. Anyway, they’re all in the wrong rooms but then two of them aren’t on the list so shouldn’t be here anyway.

We’re off to see about fitting a new toilet seat in one of the rooms that we’ve not used for a while before everyone turns up (they weren’t here ’til getting on for midnight when they came last year!).

The run of peculiar incoming links to this blog continue.

Every time I mention something finance related, a whole raft of blog aggregation blogs pick up the post and republish it. The theory is that they’ll make money on the ads on their site and, of course, they don’t have any nasty work to do once they set up the aggregator.

I write a fair bit on various finance topics so I can understand them monitoring this blog for any appropriate key words and then picking up on them. Or is it simply the category “banking & finance” that they are picking up on? Well, this entry is tagged with that as an experiment so I’ll know better tomorrow.

Other places are a bit more unusual. For example, my piece on The Color Purple was picked up by a literature aggregator and the one on building your own house by a home aggregator. I’m very tempted to play games with them to see just what they’ll pick up 🙂

Still, it does help the incoming links which is all to the good.