Rachael McKelvey

• 100% mortgages are back
• Financial Education in Schools
• The current cost of living
• Protecting overweight people
• Eurovision

100% mortgages are back
If you didn’t read that & hear the voice, then there is something wrong with you. Anyway, Skipton Building Society have opened a no deposit, unguarantored product aimed solely at renters looking to make the move to home ownership.

I already know what a certain generation think without even having to ask, 100%+ mortgages gave off strong main character energy in the 2008 financial crash, which my generation has paid the price for I volunteered at Citizen Advice prior to the financial crash in 2008 & let me tell you, 100% mortgages weren’t the problem. It was handing them out like peanuts at the bar that was the problem.

Skipton appear to have done their due diligence & assessed the risks. A 5-year fix at 5.49% limited to first time buyers, maximum £600k loan value, so long as the mortgage payments in the first 5 years don’t exceed the average monthly rent paid in the last six months of renting.

It’s a solid proposition, but likely falls short of the values needed to buy the average home. I suspect it will greatly help in the north, but barely be possible for the southern counties. As with all things in life, a solid solution but unfortunately the housing market just doesn’t work.

Financial Education in Schools
MyBnk this week have called for 30 hours of financial education in schools & I am here for this. While Rishi Sunak continues his obsession with maths, which by the way, I don’t think is the magic bullet he thinks it is & a rather odd hill on which to chose to die. Context however would be a great hill on which to want to die, financial education for all.

As a donator to the FT’s Financial Literacy & Inclusion Campaign I definitely think there need to be room made at key ages for practical education around finances, make maths lessons practical, teach the basics of compounding, the cost of debt, credit ratings, pensions. All very easily covered in 30 hours to allow young people half a chance of existing formal education & being able to make better decisions from a place of confidence.

Thats how you empower people, regardless of age, by giving them the tools to make the best decision they can. Two thirds of young people do not recall having ever received any financial education and it might not be something anyone around them can help with either, but chances are we will all have income in our lives to manage, to preserve, to spend and to borrow. These are the basics, so if you insist that we must all learn maths till we’re 18, making it useful.

The current cost of living
Which released some interesting data this week on the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, showing that two million households in the UK missed or defaulted on either a mortgage, rent, credit card or bill payment last month. 2 million. 700,000 of those two million where I the housing payment category and then the tail end of this week saw the Bank of England raise interest rates again in an attempt to curb inflation.

A cost-of-living crisis disproportionately impacts the poorest, who already don’t have a cheaper alternative to buy. Retail research from Assosia looked at 15 everyday essentials at Morrisons, Sainsbury, Tesco and Asda…your mid-tier supermarkets, mid-tier and the 15-item basket had risen by 34% from 2021 to 2023.

When a standard 500g bag of pasta is now 95p, when it was 50p two years ago. No amount of financial literacy or 100% mortgages can help in a cost-of-living crisis as prolonged as this one, for many the maths just does not math and that is just not okay.

Protecting Overweight People
This week New York City council passed a law that protects against discrimination based on weight.

The life of living in a larger body is fraught with discrimination, you do not know thin privilege, unless you have been overweight and I have been overweight, morbidly so, I have been super thin, I have been fit and I currently reside in a body that is larger than feels comfortable but that simply “losing weight” is not possible due to health problems.

More than 40% of American adults are considered obese and the social studies from practical things, like being able to access facilities, sit down and weight limits to prevent moving around the city to possibly unexpected bias in costs and lower wages…especially for women.

The city councilman Shaun Abreu who sponsored the bill felt compelled to tackle the “silent burden people have had to carry” around weight stigma after he gained 18kg himself over lockdown. There are other states in the US that at local level have protections in place in the workplace against discrimination based on weight.

Eurovision
Love it or hate it, I think we need to talk about it. This years was weird, it felt a bit like a caricature of itself, which would usually be amazing but this year just felt a bit off.

It felt a very different vibe this year, properly political again but not really in and obvious political way, how did Israel do so well? I had the luxury of spending my post Eurovision Sunday morning with an International Relations and history student and it was fascinating to get their analysis and ask some probably odd questions about if there a political reason for this.

All of that aside, Liverpool put on an amazing display, twitter was superb as always and even Tiktok delivered some behind the scenes this is what happens in the 40s between the acts on stage interesting videos.

Current watch:  Evicted – Binge-watching heartbreak seemed odd this week, but what an important series. As the episodes open, when you’re a 20-something you should be having fun but they’re actually being priced out and pushed out of quite frankly awful accommodation for too much money. Section 21 has quite a lot to answer for and the statistics in the series are truly terrifying.

Current read: Happy Fat Taking up space in a world that wants to shrink you by Sofie Hagen – This book follows Sofies own journey into self-acceptance, through sharing her own experiences of fat phobia both from the external world but also her internal world to find a way to live a happy life.

This is half memoir, half social commentary with some amazing interviews with other voices in the fat liberation space, it’s funny (Sofie is a comedian), it’s beautifully sweet and really very honest – fat sex, getting stuck in a toilet, having to ask for extra things to merely be comfortably uncomfortable.

Most Impactful Listen: Robots vs Marathons – The List of Absolutely Everything That might Kill You – Hosted by radio presenter Matt Edmonson and author and comedian Adam Kay, the pair battle out innocuous everyday items that might be secretly plotting to kill us to create a lethal league table of sorts. They are each others ying to their yang and make a real lovely pair, they are joined by Professor Jennifer Visser-Rogers their resident statistician to apply the statistics from the surprising histories. This particular episode might surprise you as much as it did with. Well into marathon season and all the talk of robots, which do you think will mostly kill you?