Friday, 7 December 2018

Weekend reading: Feudal dues

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What caught my eye this week.

Hey Millennials! Top tip time! One of the best ways to improve your chances of owning your own home is to make sure you’re born into a family where your parents do, too.

Take a look at this graph charting new data from the Resolution Foundation:

As reported in the FT [Search result]:

Those with the richest parents are the most likely to own a house by the age of 30. Roughly a third of people in this category were homeowners themselves by the time their 20s were over.

They are followed not far after by those in the second two quartiles who both had about a 28 per cent chance of owning a house in their 30s.

Then, much further behind [are] those whose parents did not have any property wealth at all, who had just a 13 per cent chance of becoming a homeowner.

So there you have it – be lucky babe!

I mean it’s sweet that you’re skipping your avocado toast and all.

But as any old Barry Blimp will tell you, he too once ate an avocado in 1977, but that didn’t stop him buying a terraced house in London in the early 1980s.1

Of course he didn’t have to pay for an iPhone or any similar nonsense.

But he would happily have gone without such frippery and stayed in counting his bedrooms for fun instead if he’d had to.

Because that’s just how tough we were back then.

From Monevator

How to stick to your savings goals – Monevator

From the archive-ator: Thoughts on the new gold rush [From 2010]Monevator

News

Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view you can click to read the piece without being a paid subscriber. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing if you read them a lot!2

Subsidence claims by households quadrupled during summer heatwave – ThisIsMoney

Sharp deterioration in service sector growth leaves the economy flat-lining – ThisIsMoney

UK house price growth slips to six-year low amid Brexit uncertainty – Guardian

New property tool shows what your salary would buy around the world – ThisIsMoney

No, it’s not just your lousy portfolio. Everything’s down 2018 – NDR/Cullen Roche via Twitter

Products and services

Aviva to break the ‘loyalty penalty’ for home and car insurance [Search result]FT

Ratesetter will pay you £100 [and me a bonus] if you invest £1,000 for a year – Ratesetter

Cost of Christmas dinner rises: Aldi and Lidl remain cheapest [Search result]FT

O2 to make goodwill gesture after millions hit with data outage – Guardian

Comment and opinion

The double whammy – Young FI Guy

Doing nothing about a market decline – Oblivious Investor

The case for long-term investing optimism – Retirement Field Guide

How a City fund manager quit work early and still paid for his children’s education – EFC

Three reasons to hold long bonds as short rates rise – Pragmatic Capitalism

When things stop working – Of Dollars and Data

First impressions – Humble Dollar

Patient capital: The key to long-term wealth creation – Financial Samurai

There’s some evidence index fund growth is curbing performance chasing – Morningstar

Markets are spooked by a flatter US yield curve. Is this a better guide? – Bloomberg

The hedonic treadmill of smartphones – Millennial Revolution [via Zude]

Crypto Winter is here and its enthusiasts have only themselves to blame – Coindesk

It’s easy to start a company nowadays, but harder to learn from critics – Chris Sacca

Brexit

David Lammy’s brilliant anti-Brexit speech to the Commons [Video] – via YouTube

This government: From “No deal is better than…” to “Six-month traffic jams”BBC

Norwegian politicians reject UK’s Norway-plus Brexit plan [I mean ‘plan’]Guardian

YouGov poll: Only two Parliamentary constituencies support May’s Deal [Scroll down for graphic]New European

Does the EU really need the UK more?  [Video] – TLDR via YouTube

Brexit: Facts vs fiction with Stephen Fry – via YouTube

Leave’s ‘Verdict Of The People’ nonsense in a nutshell – Alex Andreou via Twitter

Kindle book bargains

The Barcelona Way: How to Create a High-performance Culture by Damian Hughes – £1.09 on Kindle

Introducing Body Language by Glenn D. Wilson – Free for Prime Members

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott – £2.99 on Kindle

James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes by James Acaster – £0.99 on Kindle

Off our beat

How to enjoy life – Raptitude

Dicing with death – Evidence-based Investor

US scooter startups Bird and Lime are growing faster than Uber – Future Engine

“I feel inadequate around my girlfriend’s wealthy, high-achieving family”Guardian

Endangered swift parrots pushed into tragic love triangles by sugar gliders [A headline for our times]ABC News

It’s nothing like a broken leg: Done with the mental health conversation – Guardian

And finally…

“On one estimate, the adult human brain stores about one billion bits – a couple of orders of magnitude less than a low-end smartphone.”
– Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

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  1. For barely four times his salary, compared to over 10-times today.
  2. Note some articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”.


from Monevator https://monevator.com/weekend-reading-feudal-dues/

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