British Expatriate Network

I was looking at the Chancellor's budget from earlier today in UK. Obviously it doesn't affect many of us but I'm always interested to see what direction UK is going in.

I thought the extra road tax for gas-guzzlers was interesting. Most 4x4 vehicles will have to pay something like £210 now, the highest road tax on a private vehicle but vehicles that are classified as environmentally friendly won't pay any road tax at all.

This seems like a good bit of common sense. I liked the slang they use over there now for SUV's - "Chelsea Tractors".

I was reading that to. I am glad they are doing that. There is not much call for SUV's in central London.

Not much call for an Expedition unless you want to block the entire street.

/you could live in it I suppose

I was hoping they'd reduce Stamp Duty on homes. When we are going back we'll buy a new house. It's 3% of anything costing between £350k-£500k - which is not a lot of house in London - that could be a tax of £15k just to move house and on top of all the other stuff - like the loan to cover it...

Do they have Stamp Duty here...?

That'd be one of the firt things I'd do here too - a dollar extra for a gas tax.

Anyone have an opinion on Brown's plan to penalise budget airlines?

Not that I remember when we bought our house but then ours was less than the 1/2million dollar mark so it might be different on the bigger homes. the thing is as well the property taxes are a lot higher here compared to what we paid in the UK. We pay just under $10,000 a year. Maybe in those states where their property tax is a lot less they may have to pay a type of stamp duty.

In fact, when you move house, you can put your closing costs as a tax deductable on your next years tax return :)


Totally agree with the extra tax on the SUV's, unless you have the car for your job (if you are a farmer for example).

I guess it varies between states, but we have it in NH and it is split between the buyer and seller.

I don't recall paying any kind of tax to buy a house here. If it wasn't for the grubbing lenders, it would actually be a pretty reasonable process, with reasonable fees and service.

Not sure it has anything to do with property taxes - mine are around $1700 a year and we don't pay any city tax either.

No stamp duty when you buy a house here. In fact the major costs are to the seller, not the buyer -- the sellers have the 5% or 6% fee to the realtor!

no stamp duty but there is PMI if you buy a house with less than 80% equity, and its a lot. I have just done 2 mortgages to avoid it, an 80-20.

The equivalent of PMI might be having a car showroom pay your insurance so you can buy their car.

I get the point that without it, many people (including myself) could not have bought homes for some time but how many other occasions do we pay insurance premiums on a policy that we can't ever collect on?

There is something similar to PMI in the UK on mortgages of over 75% I believe. the bigger the percentage of mortgage to the value of the house the more you pay but if I remember correctly it is just a one off payment and not something you pay until the percentage difference changes, or however your state decides to work it.

It has been so long since I dealt with these kinds of things I can't remember all the details on how they work. But it was a type of insurance to cover the loan, and as Pilgrim mentioned, you got nothing back off it like many insurance premiums.

These insurance premiums were in place in the UK incase you defaulted on the loan. The loan company will sell the house but if the percentage between mortgage and price of house is not great enough they won't get their money back so they have this insurance to cover their losses.

How likely is that though? Take California for instance. What chance that the price of a property would actually drop? Not very likely and probably the same where you live.

I suppose there is a difference if a mortgage company has it auctioned off cheaply but one could argue that's their fault and why didn't they put it on the open market, as anyone else would?

Besides, when I last looked at auctioned houses in this area, they weren't going for that much less than those selling traditionally.

But why should they take any risk/make any effort when they can make you pay to insure against it?

If you default on a 100% mortgage within the first six months and trash the house on your leaving, then I think there may be a cause for the lender to believe they may not get all their money back. :)

You are right, though, the chances of that happening in certain parts of the US may seem pretty remote, that is why in NYstate they actually have to take the PMI off at 5 years no matter what. You can request for it to come off before but the lender has to take it off by 5 years. That is why this type of thing goes state by state.

You know, we could have all said that about London before the property crash of the late 80s/early 90s. Who would have said that houses in the south would lose value, but they did. A large drop and only for a relatively short time; there were many people caught in negative equity and were unable to keep up the payments either because they had lost their job because of the crash, or something else hindered their ability to work (pregnancy, incapacity etc).