Member Info for fleccy

"Well you will have to hope that you live another 7 years else hmrc will be looking at IHT for the 'gifted' undervalue amount and will present the son with a substantial bill."

I knew about all that. The house was in joint names, between me and my wife; It's been about 4 years already, and since we're only 60 hopefully time wont be an issue. It was all done above board with the solictors aware of the situation, and using an accountant recommended by our Conveyancer. As I said, i'm really careful with tax matters. I've known people who've fallen foul of VAT, and income tax, issues. One of my ex collegues, from many years back, was previously employed on commercial ships, the Tax man came after him years later and hit him with a massive tax bill, arguing that the ship he was employed on had entered the UK 12 mile limit during a voyage; He employed a solicitor, and tried fighting it, but got hammered in the end anyway. I've never been self employed, always PAYE, but a relative lost his house when the VAT man went after him, and I know of another ex collegue who ran a business on the side and the VAT man got him too; The HMRC appear to be really aggressive on VAT, and efficient at catching businesses who cheat on it, scary stuff.

"Like trying to observe a quantum particle"

You can observe a Quantum particle, but the act of observation destroys the wave funtion, so the particles trajectory becomes fixed. I suppose you could argue that a stocks range is equivalent to a wave function, and purchasing could be likened to observation fixing the position for you as the observer, but not really lol.

"P.s. selling at below market value (we looked into doing this with the tenant who wished to remain for a fast deal) is very much frowned upon by HMRC. Watch your back here."

The accountant was supplied with our Son's mortgage valuation, done as part of his mortgage application, so the tax return was based on the full market value of the property. He got a good deal on his mortgage, since his mortgage was for less than 50% of the value of the property. Not bad owning a 4 bed detached, with a 70 foot double width drive leading to a double garage, at 27. His mortgage is around the same as renting a 3 bed terraced. My sister and brother in law couldn't believe we'd done it, but I pointed out to them that you can't take it with you; And what's the point of money, later in life, if you can't give your kids a leg up.

"Slowly sold the BTL's as that market became more heavily taxed, got rid of last one about 2 years back"

When we moved to Cornwall, our Son stayed in the house in Manchester, and we eventually sold it to him for less than half its market value. Because it wasn't our main residence, and the tax calculation takes into account various factors, we employed an accountant to submit the tax return on our behalf; There were reductions for things like the number of years we'd lived in the property, the final bill wasn't that much, and since we'd never rented it to our son that wasn't a variable. We could have declared the Manchester house as our main residence, but I've seen what happened to some friends and family when they tried it on, with the HMRC coming after them years later. Was the capital gains on your BTL's excessive, or not too bad? I believe the capital gains tax on property is now 18% for basic rate earners, and 28% for higher rate earners.

"Just curious where do we all see the share price £ in 3-5 years"

£3-£5 funnily enough.

"My wife was deputy head at a rather large primary in Solihull for years, worked her ar5e off."

I would think she'd have been in the higher leadership bands as a deputy Head, so quite well paid?
The reason I don't have sympathy, as far as pay is concerned, for Teachers, Doctors, Nurses, etc, is because there are a lot of jobs that are as hard, possibly more stressful, and less well paid. I'm not complaining about my experience in Field Engineering, as we all make our choices, but it was really hard work at times, especially when on call; The overtime was great, but the hours were gruelling, with many weekends often worked day and night. Some on call weekends I clocked up between 40 and 50 hours overtime, between 17:00 on Friday and 08:00 on Monday, which was tortuous as there was no working time directive back then, and when W.T.D. did come in there were opt-outs anyway. My basic was less than a teacher, but I earned a lot more with my overtime. Not sure what you do for a job DT, but I used to dread getting a call at 3am, when I'd just returned home at 2am from another fault; And even though it was a common occurance, I never got used to it.
My issue with the current wage demands, and strike threats, is the consequences of large pay rises across the board. Using BT as an example, the CWU are asking for 10%; If BT give in and award a 10% pay rise, then every other UK company will be hit with the same pay demands, potentially leading to a wage-price inflationary spiral. In the event of a wage-price inflationary spiral, pensioners with capped pensions, Gig economy workers, and any other minimum wage worker not covered by collective bargaining, will see a real drop in living standards. The Government, and BOE, have been advising companies against offering inflation based pay increases, since the BOE will have to raise interest rates dramatically, to head off inflation, should it get out of hand, so anyone with a large mortgage, or debt, will get hammered under those circumstances. A sensible pay policy is to smooth out wage increases over a number of years, so award below inflation pay increases in high inflation periods, and above inflation pay rises in periods of low inflation, based on a formula; What the formula would be, I have no idea, but big wage increases chasing high inflation would be ruinous for the economy.

Harry Dent thinks everything is in a bubble, so he's only invested in US Treasury Bonds. I think he must have missed the FTSE performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teHU7Z1YjhU

Looking at a long term chart of the FTSE, compared to US indexes, the FTSE is not, and has not been in a bubble. Over the last 5 years, the NASDAQ has outperformed FTSE by 83%, down from 157% outperformance in Nov 21; The DOW has outperformed the FTSE by 47.7%, down from 68% outperformance in Nov 21 . I honestly don't see the FTSE as being in a bubble, which is likely due to the components making up the FTSE. The FTSE has not only underperformed, but it's actually down by over 2% over the last 5 years, I don't see how anyone describe that as bubble territory.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/UKX:INDEXFTSE?comparison=INDEXDJX%3A.DJI%2CINDEXSP%3A.INX%2CINDEXNASDAQ%3A.IXIC&window=5Y

Read some of the comments in this article, strikes are as devisive in this country as politics these days. I suspect the General public have little sympathy for strikers. The comments are more interesting than the article.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/06/cwu-vote-to-strike-over-bt-pay-as-openreach-prep-contingency-plan.html

"In a funny way you ridiculous comments have provided evidence to support my point about contractors and sub contractors doing the majority of the fibre first rollout work. Just shows how the continued denial of several BT group employees are so out of touch."

"Whats with all this contractor bashing on here? I would love to see you Openreach guys experience a year of contracting, being paid less than £25 for a mornings work doing full whack provides, new dropwire, lead in, socket, dealing with faulty D and E sides after you have nicked a pair UG feeding a spare on the DP without updating or even caring where that between joints pairs’s DP and term was. 10 Spares on CSS, all DIS UG yet showing as preconnected, then having to deal with the faulty e side and a PCP that hasnt been built correctly.

Yes you may have to fix our mess ups, but you get paid per hour, and have a good package on top of that. We get a pittance, and then you using the candid app on us all the time to get our money for the job took off us for clearing the fault in the PCP on closure, when you actually cleared it in a rotten Joint UG!

Oh, and then clear off at 16:10 when we are still working til 7 while your having dinner with family!"

Just to add to my last post. Any job involving people looking at screens, taking calls, analysing data and performing remote actions, can be replaced with AI. What AI isn't currently capable of doing is thinking outside of the box, so a small percentage of faults will require a back office Technical Support team, to investigate the small, less than 5%, of faults AI wont be able to cope with. My guess is, Software Engineers are already working on various seperate projects to reduce back office staff; I'm not talking about BT specifically, but across the whole industry, fortunatly for Field Engineers, they're a lot harder to replace.
Obviously these changes wont happen overnight, it'll be an evolutionary process, but industrial action's will accelerate the changes.

"How is AI going to help ? with nobody to take the call. It’s just a filter and buffer to eventually pass on to a real person"

You'll never be able to replace real people completely, but AI will reduce back office staff dramatically, leaving a core of technically able operators who'll have higher access to systems, technically they'd be somewhere between the current call centre basic operator, and Network operations Engineers. My guess is you could reduce call centre staffing by a significant amount, maybe 75%, over a number of years .
Anyone remember the early attempts at speech recognition? It was useless, probably 50% accurate on a good day, and that was after you'd trained the application to recognise your voice, if you had a cold forget it. Nowaday's look at speech recognition, you can ask Alexa about most things, the app will recognise the question, whoever is asking, so highly technical question like "Why does 5h1t stink" can finally be answered.
What could you do with AI? While we're still on PSTN, AI could ask questions, make line tests, raise a fault, and assign a priority dependent on SLA's, etc; It could also decide to pass customers onto dedicated teams dependant on pre-programmed criteria.
Once PSTN is switched off, and everyone's on Passive Optical Networks, faults will become more apparent as multiple customers will be affected per OLT, with the diagnostics within the Exchange OLT's raising alarms immediatly; Should the operators decide to implement it, AI could be used to monitor and filter alarms and immediately email affected users dependant on the severity of the alarms, as well as giving status/progress updates; The reason i suggested that customers might be emailed dependant on the "severity of the alarms", is that errors and intermittent faults might not fall within SLA's warranting immediate action, so customers wouldn't need updating unless Fault resolution requires extensive downtime.
After many teething problems, AI wont just reduce customer facing staff, but it'll likely reduce the number of jobs in Network Operations too; You have Network Operations Engineers monitoring Alarm screens 24 hours a day, the alarms will be assigned a priority, and the higher priority alarms will be the ones attracting the attention of the Engineers; You also have thousands of minor alarms fleeting through, that'll be ignored unless there's a customer complaint, which will then be investigated under a customer raised fault; AI could monitor every alarm, collate them automatically, and change the priority of persistant intermittent alarms, then raise a fault to be processed by the back office operators, or assigned straight out to the Field Engineers.
I repeat what i said at the beginning of this post, "You'll never be able to replace real people completely, but AI will reduce back office staff dramatically".

"Hopefully it will see a deal sooner rather than later"

If it was me I'd up the offer to £1500.01, and if I was really pushed maybe £1500.10. That extra 10p could make all the difference.

"It’s not all about pay there’s other issues which people are 100% not happy about ie £500 of shares promised each year (now gone) no share save for last 2 years which was a way of saving, forced redundancy changed from 2 years to 12 months after it was promised after they shut down the pension scheme with no consultation, the new one is trash compared basically loosing thousands, plus many more issues etc etc,"

I was in a final salary scheme since the 1980's, and then around 2009/10/11 the scheme was changed from 40 60th's to 40 85th's, with the option to improve it through salary sacrifice, and the company matching the salary sacrifice up to 10%, which I opted for; With the salary sacrifice of 10% and the company matching 10% it brought it down 40 63rd's, It didn't matter much though, because we were taken over a couple of years later, and the Final Salary scheme stopped about a year later; We were then put on a DC pension, which I contributed into up to being made redundant. I was made redundant with 12 months pay, standard for FTSE Blue Chips; Three months notice, plus 4 weeks for every year worked up to a maximum of 10 years.
Grs24, BT's benefits seem generous, at least as good as other comparable FTSE blue chip companies, and probably better than most. Who gets 2 years redundancy payout these days? BT have been super generous in the past, but they still have to compete with non unionised businesses like Virgin Media, City Fibre, Vodafone, etc. All BT have done, is gone some way to bring you in line with their competitors, but you're probably still better off than most.

" don’t know how the ballot was worded but in the past it has been, up to and including strike action, if so then other things may be implemented by the CWU before strike action, work to rule etc, believe me just that can cause major issues."

How can call centre staff work to rule? I've dealt with faults in call centres and seen how they operate. The system constantly measures performance through workforce management software, with the staff measured on call answering times, etc. The supervisors, on the sites I've worked, also had real time statistical analysis tools, with the capability to remotely monitor external operators screens.
The Engineers could probably work to rule, but my understanding is that Openreach use contractors to perform a good percentage of the installs these days.
Network Operation Centre Engineers probably work shifts, and are also likely measured against SLA's. I've worked Field and Network Operations, with performance related pay, not flat rate pay rises. I have no idea if BT award pay rises measured against performance, but it's common in other companies/industries these days. Working to rule isn't as easy as it used to be.

"No doubt there will now be new talks between BT and the CWU which hopefully will result in an agreement before any action takes place."

How will they come to an agreement? They seem to be miles apart. My personal opinion is that BT should hold their ground. Delays due to strike action wont require compensation since they'll be covered under Force Majeure, and if BT gives in it'll validate bigger pay claims in other industries. Why does the CWU talk about shareholder's with such contempt? My pension is capped at 4.2%, currently around £20,000 a year; I've saved my ar5e off all my life, and invested in stocks to supplement my pension in retirement. If I'm honest, the CWU rhetoric directed at shareholder's makes me despise them, since it feels personal. Anyway, I hope the BT management hold their ground.

"Because the inflation pressure is not from consumer demand, trying to reduce consumers demand isn’t going to work,"

Well it's worked on every other occassion throughout the history of finance. What you don't seem to understand is that high wage increases feed inflation, which feeds wage increases, feeding more inflation, and so on until you get hyperinflation destroying the economy. I can't see any central bank wanting out of control inflation, and since the only way of reducing demand is to raise interest rates, then that's what they'll do; If that leads to a severe recession, it's less destructive than hyperinflation. I don't disagree with you that inflation's been caused by supply chain issues, with Oil/Energy affected by the war, but the BOE have one hammer to stop inflation, and the hammer's called higher interest rates.

"This inflation isn’t caused by demand. It’s caused by non consumer activity & necessity.
It’s not difficult to understand, is it?"

So why can't you understand it?

"Because higher interest rates mean higher borrowing costs, people will eventually start spending less. The demand for goods and services will then drop, which will cause inflation to fall. "

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/09/how-interest-rates-affect-markets.asp#:~:text=Because%20higher%20interest%20rates%20mean,will%20cause%20inflation%20to%20fall.

"Do you want to explain how increasing borrowing costs / squeezing money on the retail end in the uk will reduce energy inflation?"

Just to add, peope on a tight budget will reduce their energy usage as much as possible, so it probably wont be a massive bonanza for energy providers. We've cut back on our journeys due to the higher fuel prices, which we can easily do as we're retired. Many now have the option of working from home, which will also reduce demand for fuel, although it will increase energy usage for those individuals.
I worked in Telecoms, and we had various occassions when we weren't allowed to work on sites, due to Christmas Freezes, events like the Olympics, etc, and it was found that faults dropped by a significant percentage when no Engineering activity was taking place. The call centre staff are probably more of an issue, but over time they'd be the easiest to outsource, or replace.

Energy inflation in itself isn't a cause for concern, and interest rate rises do affect energy and oil prices by raising the value of the currency, against other currencies. Raising interest rates also has the affect of reducing demand internally, which leads to producers and importers having to reduce margin to remain competitive. The UK is a consumer nation relying on imports more than exports, and with the amount of mortgage debt out there the BOE wont need to raise rates as much as 1979, where it hit 17%. If the Unions keep asking for ever larger pay raises, expect the BOE to inflict severe pain on people with variable rate debt, raising rates by 0.5%, or 075% increments in short order. Higher interest rates also encourage people to save, where they can afford to, which also impacts consumer spending. It's not like this is a new paradigm, history proves that higher wages leads to higher inflation, and higher interest rates feed through to lower inflation. Destroy demand and you bring down inflation, simples.

"This inflation is not caused by retail spending, or an attempt to retail spend, this inflation is caused by wholesale increases the other end."

It's irrelevant what the initial causes of inflation are, the easiest way to stop inflation is to reduce demand; The easiest way for the BOE to reduce demand, and take money directly out of people's pockets, is to raise interest rates until inflation comes under control. By reducing demand for products, it leads to surplus supply and prices coming down, leading to a reduction in inflation; Of course everyone with a mortgage will get hammered, including low paid BT workers.

"Can i send you a form to fill in for joining the CWU. We could do with a know it all like you , advising us"

No thanks. Union's aren't serving pensioners, like me, by rooting for a wage-price inflationary spiral, since my pension increases are capped at 4.2% annually. If all the Unions got their way, big inflation busting pay rises would lead to higher prices, then next year they'd be looking for more big pay rises, and before you know it inflation rages out of control.