Cyprus-Forum.com

[kurupetos]

Any one translate this : EPSHIASTIASIN POU TO PORNON TSIE EOKAN HAME OPOS TOUS KOURKOUTAES .

"They started fighting early morning and fell down like lizards". (I think)

Come on, that was easy!

[miltiades]

Any one translate this : EPSHIASTIASIN POU TO PORNON TSIE EOKAN HAME OPOS TOUS KOURKOUTAES .

"They started fighting early morning and fell down like lizards". (I think)

Come on, that was easy!

But could he , Kafenes , make a song out of it !!

[kurupetos]

Any one translate this : EPSHIASTIASIN POU TO PORNON TSIE EOKAN HAME OPOS TOUS KOURKOUTAES .

"They started fighting early morning and fell down like lizards". (I think)

Come on, that was easy!

But could he , Kafenes , make a song out of it !!

Oh, how lovely!

[roseandchan]

i think the world has been going mad for a while. when we were in business in the uk we always had credit cards. credit cards are great when you pay in full at the end of the month, but many people don't know how to use them to there own advantage. its great now i don't even have a mortgage. my grandmother always taught me that you can't have what you can't afford, it worked for me!

[Get Real!]

i think the world has been going mad for a while. when we were in business in the uk we always had credit cards. credit cards are great when you pay in full at the end of the month, but many people don't know how to use them to there own advantage. its great now i don't even have a mortgage. my grandmother always taught me that you can't have what you can't afford, it worked for me!

It seems that grandmother forgot to also mention that you can't have what you don't own.

[purdey]

Yes I agree with you. The problem now is people are having to use their credit cards to survive. I believe EGG were the first company to penalize their customers who did not carry over a balance to the next month.

[roseandchan]

thats why we have a turkish title deed house, pre 1974

[Tim Drayton]

Well it is a great shame that the American way of life is contaminating Cypriot Zeitgeist

Family life will suffer and hence all the true Cypriot values.

Why can't people resist the hype ... and stick to a more meaningful way of life?

BTW does anyone know what patihase means?

Das ist Deutsche es ist nicht Englische.

Mann kann das Wort "Zeitgeist" auf Englisch auch verbrauchen!

[JoJo]

Worse off than ever before
By Naomi Caine
May 21 2008
With our fast cars, handheld computers and digital television sets, it's easy to feel better off than the previous generation. But there's more to prosperity than electrical goods - and in many ways today's 30 and 40-somethings are worse off than their parents.

A quick glance at house prices helps you understand why. Property values have soared by 171% over the past 10 years. The average house now costs £191,556, up from £70,696 a decade ago. It's a lot of money on any measure, but especially when you consider that wages have not kept pace, rising an average of 50% over 10 years.

High price for family homes
High house prices put the squeeze on family finances. The typical house now costs more than six times the typical salary, according to figures from the Halifax. If you look back a generation, the average property was worth about 2.8 times the average earnings.

If you earn below the average income, it's a struggle. More than 70% of towns are unaffordable to key sector workers. First-time buyers are also finding it hard to get onto the housing ladder. The average house is now beyond the financial reach of a first-time buyer in 466 out of 483 towns in the UK. No wonder the number of first-time buyers fell to about 300,000 in 2007 - the lowest level since 1980 and a 44% drop on 2002's figure of 532,000.

Mortgage slaves
Soaring house prices equal big mortgages. So people in their 30s and 40s are slaves to their home loan. And that makes them slaves to their jobs. But the job market has changed over the past 25 years. Unemployment is thankfully low at below 800,000, a drop of 125,000 over the past year.

But we don't enjoy the same occupational certainty as our parents, many of whom took a job for life. Nowadays we work on the edge, where short-term contracts, freelancing and part-time work are the norm. The lack of job certainty makes us financially precarious. It also means that many of us must forgo the comfort of sick pay, holiday pay and maternity benefits.

Few final salary schemes
We can't even look forward to a decent pension when we retire. Our parents are probably the last generation to enjoy the gold standard of pensions - a final salary scheme. Only about a third of final salary schemes are now open to new members, a figure that is expected to decline. So, our pension won't be linked to our earnings and underwritten by our employers. No, we will have to rely on the stock market to fund our old age.

That's if we bother saving into a pension. More than half of adults don't contribute to any kind of pension, according to the Prudential 2008 Retirement Savings Report. People who choose to save, have halved their contributions over the past 12 months to an average of £144.57 a month.

Inflation issues
If that were not bad enough, it's getting harder to make ends meet because prices are rising. The government's official rate of inflation jumped to 3% in April and is expected to stay above the target of 2% for at least the next two years.

The driving forces behind the rising inflation rate are higher energy and food costs. Wholesale gas prices, for example, have more than doubled since the middle of 2007, prompting the big energy companies to announce gas and electricity price hikes at the beginning of the year. Then there's food. World agricultural prices rose by more than 40% in the year to January 2008. Over the past 12 months, average prices for bread, biscuits and cereals have shot up 8.5%, an all-time record.

Higher taxes
Bigger tax bills don't help. The typical council tax bill, for example, has risen more than 90% over the past decade. In fact, total tax receipts have almost doubled over the past ten years from £289 billion in 2006-07, when Labour came to power, to £520 billion in the last tax year. The increase in the tax take means that families on average paid £5,600 more in tax in real terms in 2007-8 compared with 1996-7, according to figures from the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

What's our solution to our financial problems? We borrow money to make ends meet. So, we take out a bigger mortgage to unlock some of the equity in our home. We run an overdraft, arrange a personal loan or spend on a credit card. We even turn to our parents for help. More than 10 million adult children have "sapped" their parents' savings, according to a report from Scottish Widows. The average amount given by parents to their offspring is £12,300, causing a total savings sap of £55 billion.

Debt mountain
It all adds up to the biggest debt mountain on record. It also adds up to a whole lot of trouble for the next generation. If we have big debts but little or no savings, what's left for our children? How can we give them a financial leg up if we are already on our knees? And they might need our help.

We have lived through an economic boom. But the storm clouds are gathering. The credit crunch dragged growth down to 0.4% in the first three months of the year, the slowest pace for three years, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. The annual growth rate is now about 2.5%, compared with 2.8% in the last three months of 2007.

Official Treasury forecasts suggest the economy will grow by between 1.75% and 2.25% this year. But its predictions are more optimistic than those of most economists. The Bank of England predicts annual growth could drop to as low as 1% over the next two years.

It could get very bloody if house prices continue to fall and unemployment starts to rise.

No legacy worth having
It's not much of a legacy is it? It seems our children will pay the price for our debt-fuelled consumer spending spree. But if they won't inherit any wealth from their cash-strapped parents, at least they might inherit a more responsible attitude to money. Let's hope so, for all our sakes.

[Rozz]

Patihase is not German. I have never heard of it. Patise also is unknown to me. Perhaps you mean Patisserie which is German!