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This is the problem the West now has with Russia and the BRICS nations.

I’m current sat around 7.5% yield which beats CTY at 4.92% yield. I don’t need to pay fund fees. ANY fee compounds over a long enough time as a drag. plus with such a long investing horizon (state retirement age will be 75+ and private 65+ for my cohort) I have plenty of time to own a bit of everything. There are plenty of dividend paying companies which are not worth owning. and yes it’s not all just about yield. it’s PE ratios, payment history, debt burden etc. world-wide there are also great companies which generate decent income also, for now starting with the FTSE but will eventually move on to others. I think the plan is to never sell the portfolio, and live off the dividends, and pass onto to future children, as the house crisis cannot be fixed over just 40 years, so without help my children will be born as indentured servants for their whole lives.

In my job I have created a few innovations, and although small do make things slightly more efficient. in life every single one of us stands upon the shoulders of giant's. my tiny contribution will slightly increase competitiveness of the company I work for, and competitors will have to up their game a fraction. in some small way I have a tiny body of work will had added to human progress. which will make the products a fraction cheaper and lead times a little shorter, which then goes onto making food a fraction cheaper, and humans in general a little leaner. I don’t think pooping out children itself is all that special, it’s as natural as taking a dump, if you can raise children who go onto contributing to society, either through their own innovations, or supporting society to give others the ‘space’ to innovate, then it is a good thing. think life’s purpose is to contribute to the human struggle. to play your part. for your life to have some meaning, some kind of result. and this is not from the point of view as some kind of swarm or ‘human infestation’, technology is a wonderful thing. We can become less impactful through technology. it’s also why certain ‘jobs’ are morally horrific, like BTL, where nothing is created, they act as drags and damage progress, to leech of others. Same goes for certain banking jobs. our lives are finite, we are but ants, I guess what I’m saying is ‘make it count’.

Why not just buy CTY? It would be a bit easier to manage.

In my teens I went through a period when I was seeking the answer to a question that has puzzled philosophers for time eternity; what is the purpose of life. I read everything that came my way searching for an answer, text books, novels, magazines. I stumbled on a book, The Sonnets of Sakespeare. I recall a phrase, 'Tis the duty of a man to have a son. Over the years I recall the phrase and thought it was a line from a sonnet and try as I might I could not find it. I now realise it was part of an analysis by the academic author of the book explaining the thrust of the sonnets. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/read/ Without trying to be vulgar all I can say is that I found it most enjoyable making the effort to procreate. I continued the effort for many years even after fulfilling my duty to have a son. An enduring regret was not having the financial resources that enabled me to share my efforts with a greater number of nubile women. I was fortunate that the woman who choose to marry me satisfied me. Carnal thoughts still persisted. * in a roundabout way I've answered the question posed by the thread, except about my financial investments which is the narrow scope of the question. I've more significant material possessions acquired over my lifetime and the non financial value of a long marriage with two children who we enjoy good relationships with.

I know people on here get it, but the average person does not, so I think it is always worth reminding ourselves of. Doesn't matter how much "money" anybody has without the energy and natural resources to back it up. It's tragic enough that most people think money grows on trees, but they think energy does too.

Congratulations. Stick to the plan. I had exactly the same philosophy at your age. It is amazing how things start to snowball in a positive way after you reach a certain point. Needs patience though.

This. MMT is basically communism by banking. It ignores the fact that people will not work (put energy into a task) unless they can get back something of value. If currency is printed at will under MMT, people will quickly work out that energy in from them =/= energy out they get. They will stop working. At which point communism starts to use guns on the workers. Always happens. Imagine two countries, the UK and Australia. UK adopts MMT and starts to print pounds non stop to pay for everything. Australia doesn't. UK wants to buy copper from Australian mines to make lights work. Australian mine owner says 'wotcha got to pay with'. UK says - here, a billion quid. Australian miner say.... er, nah, it's worth nothing mate. Chinesey dude over there is paying me in gold. Bye! And the lights go out in the UK

A friend of mine sells caravans and motorhomes. Most of his stock is new with some secondhand. Nothing is cheap. His two types of customers are those just retiring with a pension draw down and what he calls young lads (probably about 30) who work in the trades and turn up with the wife and kids and with most of the money in cash in a Tesco's carrier bag. I doubt the t look like they could afford a caravan either.

You won't even get a room here for £400, let alone London.

Yeah that doesn't ring true Also there is literally nowhere anywhere near London you can rent a room for 400. Most places even double that won't get you a room Also being a teacher for a maximum 6 years won't see her take home pay at more than 2500 a month Seems a load of made up nonsense But good to link back to in a few years when she is complaining that her rent and service charges have doubled and the flat has lost 100k in value

Doesn't square up to me. It sounds like a bit of an advert. So the purchase price was £530000 and her share is £132,500, so she is being charged £497 a month on £397500? Idk much about shared ownership but the rent is 2.75% on the portion you don't own. So mortgage cost = £606 Shared ownership = £910 Service charge = £288 Almost certainly these flats have district heating = £100-200 Seems absolutely unaffordable as a teacher living on their own.

Store of value. MMT steals money from the economy of money by diluting it, but it doesn't expand the pot, it merely shuffles the wealth around. Otherwise everyone would be printing themselves rich!

For me, money is the tool that allows exchange of value to occur. What is value in a human system? Worthwhile human effort and time that produces something that's needed by one of a million markets. When the human input loses value, the perception of value is warped over time. Combine that with credit and it amounts to a lot of valueless shit. Credit is the bastardisation of money. The con man's money. Precisely because there's no human value in it's production. Like Bitcoin. Buy a couple of computers and press go. No human effort. It's exactly why AI art is bollocks. There's no time and effort in it. It has no value. The logical endpoint of that is computers trying to swap something it created in 0.2 seconds for something else some other computer created in 0.2 seconds, except there would be no need because it could do it itself. The value is entirely eradicated. Value is held both in utility and in human achievement. Hence gold's intrinsic value. It takes massive amounts of time and effort to produce it while at the same time being indestructible, uncopyable and useful. We have lost the value of and within ourselves. We're more valuable than we appear to collectively believe.

Adding value can be subjective. How many of the millions of additions to GB in the last 20 years add needed goods and services to our economy that improve our output and living experience? At the minute it feels like the UK establishment is printing currency and humans.

Where MMT falls over is simple ,you would be relying on governments to be responsible/prudent etc,where in reality it would be a race to see who could print the fastest Creating money via debt is what i would call the safety valve ,which discourages the above occurring ,,ask Zimbabwe etc I think China has the nearest we will ever come to seeing MMT where by the major retail banks are government owned and the currency is not floated RMB ,money is still created via debt the same as in the west but that debt is almost all held within the country ,then they mainly use these banks to finance their own industries/infrastructure ,whilst the smaller retail/private banks finance private/personal lending, how do they mange to control it ,,they still hang bankers that go rouge

Because this way we have to pay rent on all the money in existence to the banks.

The same applies to everyone, not just immigrants - not many have a lifetime average wage of £50k as the average is closer to £30k. It's just another part of the government's basic mismanagement of the country, both their failure to secure the borders, and their failure to create a productive economy.

Give it a few more years of splashing it around and £3 billion will be a couple of loaves of bread

"why are we borrowing money in a currency we print ourselves?" For me the answer is because Bankers control the money supply. If the money supply was controlled by farmers, coal miners or hookers the financial system would look very different.

I'll have a crack at this question At it's core it is just the accounting system of who owns what value* to whom. It only works because of legal tender laws; government demanding taxes in their own money and when you do work you get given money to account for the effort you put in for the person / organisation who gave you the cash. *in terms of energy and resources. The dictionary deffinition is "a current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; coins and banknotes" which for me is a description of what the medium of exchange is, not the explantion of what the medium of exchange is.

‘I bought my three-bedroom shared ownership home aged 25 with only a £13,250 deposit’ Teacher Farhana Mallick bought a shared ownership home in the Royal Docks, at the centre of a £2bn regeneration zone. https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/buying-mortgages/i-bought-my-threebedroom-shared-ownership-home-aged-25-with-only-a-ps13-250-deposit-b1155069.html Farhana Mallick was only 25 years old when she found herself exhausted by renting in London. “I decided I was done losing my money on rent,” Mallick, now 27, says. “I wanted to invest in a property and have a home I could make my own.” Previously she’d lived at home with her parents in east London, where she was raised, or rented a tiny room in a shared house for £400 a month. As a history teacher at a school in Barking and Dagenham, she was one of the key workers increasingly priced out of living in the city where she worked. But scraping together a deposit large enough to buy somewhere near her family and workplace was tough. “In London, the house prices are now very high — if I hadn’t bought with shared ownership, I would still be renting or living with my parents,” she says. “It gives you a lifeline, especially for someone in their 20s or 30s.” Mallick took out a mortgage on a 25 per cent share of a three-bedroom apartment in the Royal Albert Wharf development in Newham, east London. The property was on the market for £530,000, so a 25 per cent share equated to £132,500. That required a deposit of £13,250 — far below the three-figure deposits buying in London can now require. “Shared ownership really appealed to me because it meant I required a much smaller deposit than if I was buying privately,” says Mallick. Her monthly costs are £1,391 for the three-bedroom flat. Of that, £606 goes on her mortgage and £497 on rent for the part she doesn’t own, plus a £288 service charge. Although it’s much more than she was paying on rent for a room, Mallick is very happy with the level of freedom and space her home gives her.

Your having a laugh Dave reckons we got loads of money

I would not be to sure about that ,second hand cars were very cheap for the best part of a decade until the coof hit The lease market is dead now ,but it`s that market that fed into the second hand market ,it was the sheer volume that lowered prices ,there will be a correction but, my money is on far lower volumes will put a floor under the market above what we use to see in the second hand market I hope i`m wrong i`m going to need a new car sooner rather than later and it wont be "new"

5% was just a random number I picked out the air, its more the concept of just creating the money outright without credit.