Mortgages: a chain around your neck or the shoulder of a giant?

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So you are thinking about cheap mortgages? Haven’t you heard that interest rates are rising? Property prices, too, in the UK, are sky high, and it’s getting difficult, if not impossible for people to purchase their first property. What ways can you use to get yourself on the property ladder less expensively, with less pressure, and less hassle?

1. Save for your deposit. When prices are as high as they are, you should be saving for your deposit. You may be lucky that one day prices start to fall, and suddenly, you’ll be eager and ready to pay up for your house, and include a nice hefty downpayment.

2. When you pay that downpayment, you’ll notice that your equity portion is much larger than the typical 0% on most mortgages (as they are 100% mortgages). Your interest rates should be a little cheaper, AND your monthly payments will be lower, too.

3. Don’t rush into any deals. It’s often more in the interests of the seller to rush a deal through, not in the interests of the buyer. So, dilly dally until you find the perfect house.

4. Deals may be about property, but they always involve people. If you don’t like the people on the other end of the deal, don’t be afraid to drop the deal, providing of course you haven’t signed any paperwork. It’s your money after all.

5. Do look around to compare mortgages. As you buy a property, so you should sign a mortgage, slowly, carefully and thoughtfully. Get the facts, think them over, then focus on the important points. And READ the agreement BEFORE you sign.

6. And, one of the great things about mortgages and inflation, you’ll find that in 20 years when you’re still paying your mortgage that you’ll likely be paying a much smaller portion of your salary than right now towards it. This long term view will help you to realize that the burden will be constant, but in this case inflation is your friend as it increases your salary but eats away at your debt!

So, relax, clear your mind, and think long term. Then you’ll find that mortgage hunting isn’t so stressful when you look at the big picture.

And you thought a notebook pc was small?

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I was browsing on StumbleUpon this evening when I came across this rather unique specimen which is claimed to be the smallest Linux computer in the World. I personally can’t verify this claim, but it is a unique product.

“The picotux 100 is the world’s smallest Linux computer, only slightly larger (35mm×19mm×19mm) than an RJ45 connector.”

It runs a form of Linux called uClinux, but I’m just not sure what consumers could do with this product. It hasn’t got much of a user interface…

What would you do with one of these? I guess in a few years, we’ll be seeing entire pcs with operating systems mounted in these devices!

How to Double Firefox Speed | PCTipsBox

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For those of you who like to do things manually, PCTipsBox explains how you can “double the speed of Firefox”, in their article.How to Double Firefox Speed

The article goes into some detail, and there are a couple of suggestions I didn’t know, including the values content.interrupt.parsing, and content.max.tokenizing.time.

Of course, you can use the FasterFox plugin for Firefox to do much of this automatically! But plugins do tend to slow things down a little on startup!