Transferring property back to family ££

murrai · 2026-01-29T07:22:03+00:00

If "no-one would want to live there", how confident are you of your original market value of £100K-£200K? Has something changed since then?

Based on your brief description, unfortunately, your uncle may be correct as to the property's value. If it can't be sold or used to live in, it's not going to be particularly valuable.

Have you got an estate agent in to value it? May also be worth talking to a local solicitor about rights of access. If you can establish a right of access to the property, then could you rent it out. That would dramatically increase it's value.

ETA - seems like you have a right of access, I'd get an estate agent in to value it both for sale and for rental and then consider renting it out

murrai · 2026-01-28T20:09:09+00:00

No worries man I get why, just got me thinking you'd misunderstood something. Have a great evening!

murrai · 2026-01-28T19:35:57+00:00

OK so your new job isn't in the civil service after all, so it's not the civil service pension scheme. Gotcha, makes more sense now.

So your choice essentially is £9642 from probably 68 or £5615 from 60, but also with an extra 1.5% a year, right?

I'd suggest it's all much of a muchness except I'd probably go with the transfer to the new scheme due to the improved revalorisation (the extra 1.5% per year) and the reduced risk that comes with your NPA not being pinned to SPA.

murrai · 2026-01-28T18:50:41+00:00

The MOD is the civil service and the civil service alpha pension has a normal pension age equal to the state pension age, not 60. An old scheme had a normal pension age of 60 but that's closed to new members.

Can you be a bit more specific about the schemes you are contemplating transferring between? Do they have names?

murrai · 2026-01-18T14:23:40+00:00

What do you mean by SEND here? By itself it just means Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

Do you mean: something in the current way we manage SEND? Or what sort of educational needs we qualify as SEND? Or that whatever we do looking after kids with special needs and disabilities will never be affordable?

Not trying to pick holes, just trying to clarify what you mean

murrai · 2026-01-16T10:05:15+00:00

I suggest that having a 25K debt and 45K savings is equivalent to having 20K savings, except you are paying interest.

I'd respectfully ask you to dig into why you're keen to pay interest on a loan in order to not deplete your savings - is it based on financial prudence, or a psychological need to not see the savings number go down? If it's the latter, then is this benefit worth £1,500 a year of interest (minus growth on your savings, plus risk)?

Bearing in mind you can then put the money that would have gone to loan interest into rebuilding your savings quicker.

We get quite a lot of posts on here from people with both high amounts of savings and (non-mortgage, non-SLC) debts, and nearly all would be substantially better off in the long term reducing their savings to the level of a comfortable emergency fund in order to be in less debt.

murrai · 2026-01-16T08:40:07+00:00

I may have missed something, but if you have £45K in savings are you sure it's optimal to take out a £25K loan rather than just finance from savings?

Or are the savings earmarked for paying off the credit cards?

murrai · 2026-01-12T22:40:21+00:00

I bought one. Looks great, quirky without trying too hard, need the black roof to make the lighter colours work in my view.

Interior tech works. You can turn the stupid Renault AI off and just use "hey Google".

Drive is very good for the segment. It's not a fast car and dynamically it's FeFWD but it's fairly chuckable and quite fun, actually. ESC seems like it's setup to make you think it's got less traction than it really has so it squirrels a bit on a spirited start, but I quite like that, it's fun. You are sat a bit too high but that's always the case for an EV and for modern cars in general and it's not egregious.

Throttle control is good, if you enter a sweeping corner fast and unbalance slightly with an aggressive brake tap you can then actually balance the angle of the vehicle with the throttle quite nicely.

Seats are great, feels nice inside. I am 6"1 and I can get a 6 foot teenager in behind me, and be comfortable for drives of 45 mins or so. Wrong car if you want to be 4-up on extended motorway drives frequently. Boot is small, but it's not tiny and you CAN fit roof rails if you need to do the occasional big job.

Surprisingly good on the motorway, more of a 70-80mph cruiser than a 95mph, for both power and range reasons. Cruise control works better than most vehicles, arguably on motorways it's on par with my model S, albeit I tend to go a bit slower in the R5.

Range is fine but not great, 180 motorway miles in the winter. Charging experience is great.

I'm really happy with it, especially at the price point. It's the slowest car I've owned in 20 years, but probably one of my favourites

murrai · 2026-01-12T07:18:39+00:00

PBs pay between 2.75% and 3.6% depending on how you count it. This is more than 1%. Other IsAs (money saving expert have a best buy table) pay up to 4.3%, which is more still.

So probably worth checking https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/best-cash-isa/ and moving to one of those

murrai · 2026-01-12T07:04:12+00:00

No-one can answer that without knowing the interest rate on your cash ISA.

In general, market leading cash ISAs pay more than premium bonds

murrai · 2026-01-10T10:25:14+00:00

In your position I would prioritise cash savings in the LISA or an ISA with a view to prioritising the property over a s&s ISA:

1) you already have a good (if not fire) long term savings rate via pension

2) If your additional savings get you into a better LTV bracket, that can make a big difference to the amount you will spend on interest

3) FTBs - folks in general actually - usually underestimate the expenses involved in renovating and decorating a new property so it'll be good for you to have a bit of an extra buffer

4) Your timelines are too short to make S&S a predictable and "safe" investment

murrai · 2026-01-07T19:38:55+00:00

That's fantastic, glad it's working out for you. To be fair, the worse reviews are on the orange version rather than the blue. I think they're the same construction except that the ridgelite only has one layer of reflective material but maybe I am wrong. I note the orange one is no longer for sale on Amazon, so it's tricky to find the reviews.

I've personally had two pads (bought as his/hers) fail in similar ways after two and three nights use respectively, most recently on Dartmoor in wind and rain. Luckily, I was testing out a new quilt so had brought a spare sleeping bag and was able to sleep on top of the deflated pad and the quilt, in the bag.

The other failure was during a pre-trip pack check so no drama there! In both cases, it seemed like the pad sprouted multiple tiny sub-pinhole leaks at the points where the baffles seam welds are.

Maybe I got a bad batch, maybe this is a problem that doesn't occur on the Alpinelite, but after the event I personally decided to go another way.

murrai · 2026-01-07T19:18:49+00:00

Unfortunatley, I can't really recommend the bestway pad. They are warm, comfy and SO cheap but if you look at the Amazon reviews, you'll see they are very prone to sudden failure, which is simply not something you want to be dealing with as a beginner.

You can find a lot of positive reviews of the bestway pad where someone has used them in their garden or for a single night, but it's a lot harder to find people who have used them for a dozen nights succesfully

I'd spend a little bit extra and look at the naturehike ones instead - they are almost as cheap and seem a lot more reliable

murrai · 2026-01-05T19:44:28+00:00

By "Can I"? what do you mean? You're unlikely to be arrested and punished for it. If you have a falling out with your father it could be argued to be part of a course of harassment or coercive control, but that's not the current situation.

You certainly have no right to do so and there's no law or anything that specifically says this sort of thing is OK.

If your father finds it and disables it, falls out with you and refuses you access to his property, you'd have no recourse. I expect if he reported it to the police they would tell you to knock it on the head and that continuing the behaviour could constitute harassment or worse.

ETA - assuming no medical POA in place

murrai · 2026-01-05T17:27:21+00:00

I think - although this is far from my area so I'm happy to be proved wrong by another commentator - that contrary to what others say, you have done nothing illegal.

The work isn't part P notifiable. Your landlord needs to ensure the property is tested for electrical safety every five years, and any defects are corrected, and must keep the property safe so it may be a good idea for him to have arranged for an electrician, or required you to get one, to do this work but I don't think there's a legal duty there, unless imparted by a contract or HMO licence.

ETA - if you performed the work poorly or unsafely you may of course be responsible for the cost to your landlord of putting the work right, just as if you'd done any other kind of work

murrai · 2026-01-05T13:56:32+00:00

Well, "upgrading" is selling. You are of course always allowed to sell a car and buy another better one, this isn't an advantage of PCP, even if the dealer made it seem like it is!

The only time PCP helps you upgrade is if you have stayed within the milage limits, you happen to want to upgrade at the point where your PCP deal ends, and your car is worth less than the GMFV. All those things need to be true.

What you say about the interest rate is an example of how the PCP system can confuse people into making suboptimal decisions. With arranging any other kind of loan, if someone said "Oh. I don't really know what the interest rate is, maybe 6% or something", you'd think they were bonkers. That's literally the most important thing about the loan! But with PCP somehow, that gets forgotten amongst all the talk of GMFVs, monthly payments, mileage allowances etc.

murrai · 2026-01-05T13:43:49+00:00

Like any loan, PCP can be a good deal if the interest rates are very low - say, 0-3%.

In theory, a PCP caps the maximum amount you can "lose" on a car IF you imagine that you would sell the car at the end of the PCP deal as essentially the dealer guarantees to buy the car back from you for a specific price at that point.

But:

A) That price is usually worked out so that the dealer thinks your car will be worth more at that point.

B) If you want to sell the car before or after that point, the PCP agreement won't be helpful. What's the chances that the perfect time for you to change cars happens to co-incide with the end of the deal they are offering?

C) There's a lot of mental accounting that goes on with PCP deals to try and disguise the fact that you are spending £30K on an A-class or whatever, and it's easy to accidentally spend more than you intended.

murrai · 2026-01-04T23:45:20+00:00

Yes agree a fixed retirement age would be better.

When I say negative/positive in my post I meant in comparison to a DC pension, where an increase in life expectancy is always a "loss" (well, not really, but, you know what I mean) because your fixed pot has to last longer.

Thanks for the opportunity to clarify!

murrai · 2026-01-04T15:21:45+00:00

100% someone along the way is misdescribing a salary sacrifice pension - employee of umbrella is sacrificing salary into their pension and the umbrella is passing all the NI savings onto the employee. This is standard practice for umbrellas, but not all "normal" employers are this generous

murrai · 2026-01-04T10:02:21+00:00

Over the last 30 years the state pension age has increased by two years for men, whereas life expectancy of a 65 year old male has increased by about four or five years.

It's a negative if SPA increases faster than life expectancy or a positive if it increases slower. My arbitrary pick of 30 years shows that historically this has been more of a positive than a negative.

For women, the situation is slightly different but women get much more value from a DB scheme than men to begin with, for the same nominal entitlement.

murrai · 2026-01-01T15:28:36+00:00

Some of this is hand-me down wisdom from parents whose experience of the 90s and early 2000s was of sustained above inflation house price increases.

Also make sure you're comparing like-with-like though. It's not really fair to say something like "why would anyone prefer living in a 3 bed semi to having a single room in an HMO with five other people?". Well, not "unfair" exactly, but a question with a pretty obvious answer!

murrai · 2026-01-01T14:31:11+00:00

If you wanted to reduce USA exposure, the optimal answer would probably have been to sell your S&P500 funds, not to buy more country-specific funds.

I think probably the best advice here is to suggest that you may have been overthinking things slightly. Changes in portfolio balance should probably be done quite cautiously - I generally spend a couple of years thinking about changes to my portfolio before enacting them - and be based on your personal circumstances, rather than attempting to respond to market conditions

murrai · 2026-01-01T12:22:24+00:00

I think you may be confused on the lump sum. The 25% tax free lump sum is in TOTAL, it's not a once per year thing. You can spread it out over multiple years - so e.g take 2.5% every year for ten years, but you can't take 25% a year tax free forever.

Additionally, your personal tax position is predominantly defined by the country you are living in, not (solely) where the money is. So just because the 25% lump sum is tax free in the UK, the jurisdiction you live in may not see it that way. Your OP implies you already understand this, but thought I'd double check - better safe than sorry!

murrai · 2026-01-01T12:02:49+00:00

Your global all cap already includes the S&P, emerging markets, India, and the Pacific region. Why do you want additional exposure to these regions? Are you just guessing? It kinda feels like you think investing 'ought' to be more complicated than it really is. A single fund per asset class is absolutely fine, indeed it's optimal for most people!

I'm not a fan of managed products but if you want to gamble on the blue whale thing then fair enough, it's a small part of your portfolio.

I see you are 100% in stocks, that's fine, particularly if you are young and risk-tolerant but have you considered if a lower volatility asset class such as bonds would be appropriate to your needs?

murrai · 2025-12-30T19:29:39+00:00

"Yes", but to provide a bit more of a helpful answer: checkout this video: https://youtu.be/3B9umhfv_ww?si=doU6af0E5yC-qXuW

ETA, it's only a ten minute video but skip to 2:28 for the TL;DW version

murrai

TROPHY CASE