Mansion Tax at £1.5m - what will this mean?

[MaureenOHara]

Does anyone have any idea what this might mean for an individual and what it might do to the market. What happened to the £2m market and will that be replicated or is it different?

It is easy to pretend the property bubble wasn"t a classic Mania event after the fact, very large numbers of people have to be gorged on cheap debt to create a bubble this size, no doubt the violins will be out in force as this all unwinds as everyone just wanted a "home".

Well more fool the people who took out a huge mortgage now complaining about the risk of going into negative equity. Few people HAVE to live in a house worth over £1m - they choose to.

We live in a house worth £750k and we’ve paid off the mortgage. We could move to a house worth £1.5m but we don’t need to so we are staying put.

We bought when interest rates were through the floor but we budgeted on the basis of rates being 5% over the life of the mortgage. We didn’t budget for additional taxes etc. and it is that level of uncertainty that puts doubt into people mind and increases the riskiness of the UK which then leads to the black hole spreadsheet getting worse inputs

this tax isn’t a problem for me personally but I just see it as symptomatic of the UKs decline and the lack of ideas coming out of government

So do I. But do you really not think that they won’t be coming for the 750k houses next? Clearly there were insufficient £2m houses, so now it’s £1.5m. There aren’t that more of them, so next it’s £1m of course and so on.

Plus the “valuation force” can slap on any price they like. I have challenged my council tax twice because my house is quite a bit smaller than every other house in the road but is in the same band. The answer is always simply No.

😂

Who is saying more heavily taxed? Just taxed should do it.
CGT on shares is taxed.

5% is too conservative now, the old rule of "Budget for rates at 10%" applies again IMO.

I think the idea that you buy your own for security is going to come a cropper soon. The culture of home ownership is very different here to how it is in France and Germany and you can’t change that overnight

I suppose the logical outcome is not to buy your own home. Not when after paying the mortgage, maintaining it and even improving it, it has the potential to be sequestered.

Few people need to live in a house worth £750k. They choose to.

People that horde property, such as yourself, disgust me. I doubt you need even half that much space, but you refuse to move and make the home available for those families that do need the space.

Why can't you just downsize to a modest £150k studio flat?

"most of the public wouldn"t be able to stop their "ladder climbing" behaviour if their life depended on it, it is a disease"

People should be told where to live by the government and be grateful for whatever shit hole is allocated to them. Fucking plebs with ideas above their station.

Are you Polly Toynbee by any chance?

So wanting housing stability is a crime now?

Why is your scorn directed at individuals rather than the banks, investment firms, regulators, financial institutions and successive governments that had vastly more influence over the conditions that created the property bubble? Of course access to cheap credit helped inflate house prices. But who provided that credit? Regulated it? Set monetary and housing policy? Or allowed an economy to become increasingly dependent on rising property prices?

Even now, one of the solutions to insane house prices is a 40 year mortgage. But of course, instead of securing a long-term loan to buy a home, people could just keep paying extortionate rents to a landlord for the extra homes they own - rents that in many cases may be higher than a mortgage payments. “Gorging on cheap debt” is a great metaphor for ordinary people borrowing what the financial system forces them to borrow if they want to secure somewhere stable to live.

Cheap credit has contributing to house-price inflation. But let not pretend it caused it, controls it or fuelled by greedy speculating, individual home owners who only own the home they live in. There are investors, speculators, landlords, developers, institutions and ordinary owner occupiers in the housing market. They are not one homogenous mass. They have different motivations and behaviour.

@HelpfulHelena - also you say you have a 4-bed house? How much do you think a 4-bed is in London or the suburbs?

My old house (well, my parents’ house) just came onto the market (25 years after we lived there). A 50s house in an outer zone. £1.6 flippin’ million!! Obviously some upgrades, but still quite small and squashed next to neighbours.

Because we don"t live in a socialist dictatorship, not yet anyway, there are property rights in the UK, the problem was too much cheap mortgage debt not where people choose to live.

Germany is an outlier. Many countries in Europe have significantly higher levels of home ownership and better planned rental stock.

Yeah that was the problem 🙄

Yes but the attitude is different

and the attitude to the state is different - we are moving more towards wanting the state to be more in control but traditionally the British have been far more small state

and the argument of ‘if you can afford X’ you can afford the tax is a slippery slope - if you can’t afford 3 kids without benefits should you have them? That’s an argument that could get you cancelled on here

@BeardySchnauzer ”and the attitude to the state is different - we are moving more towards wanting the state to be more in control but traditionally the British have been far more small state”

This is a large part of the issue. People are expecting to pay small state taxes while enjoying big state benefits.
Caveat: not all people

The UK is in decline, doesn’t matter why, matters what the government is going to do about it.
This government has the budget coming next month, can they pull a rabbit out of the hat? Is there a rabbit available in the hat?

people want better state services while other people pay for it more like!

I don’t think the current lot are able to find the rabbit tbh

Do you mean that assets should be disregarded, provided they are assets you approve of?

There is no hat.

🤣

Since that is not something I have advocated, I have no reason to compose such an argument.

Thanks for clarify.

Smaller, competent State please.

Turkeys voting for Christmas and asking the working farm animals to pay for it.

Thanks for clarifying, I misunderstood. I thought you were supporting that approach.