PowerSwitch

Good post Tattercoats - I'm interested in this thread because I'm in a similar situation. I took out an endowment in 1991 when I bought my first flat, because I was told that it would easily pay off my ?36K mortgage - them were t'days - when it matured. As it happens, I paid off the mortgage early, ...

Hugely interesting article, Haggis. And well done for sticking to your original idea of wine, chocs and money! Conscious of the resource plughole that the season inevitably is, and being of a mind to celebrate Yule rather than the traditional Mammonite Christmas, I was initially determined not to ac...

Private Eye reader, so had to go for $94.94...

This is really quite interesting... it looks as though the MSM (or at least, MSN :wink: ) are trying to get through, in the most Joe-and-Vera-Public-friendly way they can, that things are about to go t1ts-up: Get your own life in order ? NOW. Whatever is uncertain, firm it up. Pay off as many debts ...

I've got a friend who did a forestry degree at Aberdeen ( here . He is now an estate manager/gardener on a smallish estate in Cornwall. No staff under him to make life tricky, house with the job, lovely 3 bed barn conversion, and gets to supply himself and the 'big house' with food and wood for a l...

Hi folks - this is a highly relevant discussion for me, as I fall exactly into this category! 42 years old, no wives or ex-wives, no children, no debts, some savings. I live in a small one-bedroom flat near the centre of Edinburgh, and my mortgage was paid off two years ago. For some time, and espec...

Hi all - been reading these forums more or less daily for about a year now, although I'm an infrequent contributor. For what it's worth, I find myself oscillating between hope for the future and despair. Sometimes I can be cautiously hopeful that PO, whenever it does hit and the effects start to bec...

Good that it's being mentioned at all on the MSM; but mildly disappointing from a PO perspective, as many of these oil-related features tend to be. Evan Davis' piece just barely hinted at the forthcoming supply and demand problem, but finished by saying that the "lesson of history is that when ...

Doing a bit of a clear-out this weekend, and I came upon quite an interesting three-page article that I took from the now long-defunct Today newspaper eighteen years ago. Headlined '2050 - After The Flood', it attempts to give some idea of what Britain might be like 'in 60 years' following a sustain...

My apologies if something about this has already been posted, but there was a quite interesting discussion on Farming Today This Week this morning (Saturday), to do with the continuing viability of supermarkets once cheap oil starts to run low. I'm not usually very alert at 06.35 on a Saturday but I...

people who visit me the day after washday are greeted by festoons of white sheets everywhere Be careful about condensation !, you might need to open all your windows to ensure that all that water doesn't cause damp and mold growth inside your property. Thanks for the advice, Ballard. The place I li...

Inspiring post, stumuz. Not had my combined gas/electricity bill from Scottish Power yet; it's due any day. Been trying to reduce consumption as far as possible, but the increased price of power this year compared to last year will probably mean I'll be paying the same as before! Things like using t...

It?s been said recently that in the UK ?Peak Gas? is about to hit us, even sooner than Peak Oil; some of the cliff-edge gas supply prediction graphs for 2007 on forums like The Oil Drum are pretty sobering. A challenge I?ve set myself this winter is to find out how much I can economise on gas heatin...

Hi Jane, Simon and anyone else - I've just joined this discussion group, having first heard about PO through a series of articles that the Independent newspaper ran in the spring. Since then, been trying to educate myself about the problem and get ideas about what to do! I live in Edinburgh, but cou...