What caught my eye this week.
For anyone who owned US technology stocks that cratered in 2022 partly because society had not, after all, accelerated many years into the digital future, UK offices seem like a bit of a Twilight Zone.
Supposedly life is back to normal, so there’s less need for Zoom or Amazon – let alone ASOS or Peloton. The extra capacity these companies scaled-up to provide during the lockdowns is thus redundant. Cue plunging valuations, and mass layoffs of skilled tech sector workers.
That’s the narrative we’ve heard for at least six months. Yet I personally only know one former office worker who is back to doing (full) time.
Most of my friends with office jobs only do some days of the week. They say they are loath to lose the freedoms they discovered during the pandemic.
I was getting my hair cut before an office reunion this week – and I had to admit to my hairdresser that I’d misspoken when he asked whereabouts. These guys don’t even have an office any more.
Elsewhere my daily walk to my gym takes me through one of those modern campus business parks that’s a bit like an activity centre for adult Tellytubbies. These days it has an underpopulated feel that reminds me of the childless playground in Children of Men.
There’s the coffee kiosk on the corner that now closes by midday on Friday. The once-crammed food truck event that’s become just a man in a van. The gym that has more student bros than workers.
Brent over
We have been discussing this in Weekend Reading every few months for a couple of years. A clear majority of readers who’ve commented have said they’d never go back to five days in the office – at least not without a fight.
I had put it down to either hope over expectation or else our special audience. But it’s proven to be both a common aspiration and proven out in wider statistics.
For example, a new report from property specialists Remit Consulting found that:
…while numbers coming into offices are slowly rising — the national average office occupancy of 34.3% in the week ending January 27 was the highest since the group began tracking the figures in May 2021 — there are few signs of a rush back to five days a week “presenteeism”.
Almost three years into the pandemic – with all its disruptions fading into the memory like a broken fever dream – and yet offices are still only a third full.
Meanwhile London’s Evening Standard this week asked every FTSE 100 company about its current working arrangements. The responses suggest:
…that the old Monday- to-Friday office week that was once the default is far from making a comeback.
The research found almost all respondents offer the option of flexible and hybrid working although there are some businesses that want people in for at least a certain number of days weekly.
It suggests that for most private employers the new normal is for workers to be in offices for between two and three days per week, often between Tuesday and Thursday.
Britain appears to be at the vanguard of this Monday-Friday refusenik movement. I’ve heard it chalked up to everything from our longer commutes, worse public transport, even worse weather, or more positively to our love of gardening.
One thing is clear though – if this changed working pattern continues to hold (and by now who’d bet against it?) then the ramifications will be massive. Surplus offices rezoned, new build homes designed with a study as standard, maybe a change in how we support (or don’t support) childcare.
But for my part as someone who discovered and championed this way of life two decades ago, I just wonder what took you all so long?
Have a great weekend!
From Monevator
Why a diversified portfolio needs more than just bonds – Monevator
A cheap portfolio of cheap assets – Monevator
From the archive-ator: How I tricked myself into financial independence – Monevator
News
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UK households to suffer £4,000 blow to finances in 2023 – Guardian
MPC member Tenreyo believes UK rates are too high and may need to be cut – Guardian
What three luxury homes reveal about who owns UK real estate – BBC
UK trade deficit with EU hits record as Brexit frictions curtail exports – Bloomberg
Housebuilders have five weeks to agree to the Government’s cladding deal – Which
Nicola Sturgeon’s tax rises “will spark an exodus of wealthy Scots” – Bloomberg via YF
Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion in the US over copyright – The Verge
What does a world with billions of old people look like? – Grid
Products and services
First five-year fixes under 4% since Mini Budget launched by HSBC – Guardian
Vanguard going all-in on direct indexing says CEO – ETF.com
Open an account with low-cost platform InvestEngine via our link and get £25 when you invest at least £100 (T&Cs apply. Capital at risk) – InvestEngine
Broadband and phone bills to be investigated by Ofcom – Sky
The extra cost of shopping at the convenience store – Which
Open a SIPP with Interactive Investor and pay no SIPP fee for six months. Terms apply – Interactive Investor
Fancy launching an ETF? Think twice [US but relevant] – Factset
The latest on the confusing rules about passports when traveling to the EU – Which
Bestinvest introduces free dealing on US shares [Beware FX costs] – This Is Money
Homes for sale with beautiful windows, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
All markets are uncertain – The Uncertainty of It All
Why everything you buy is worse now [Video] – Vox via YouTube
How to retire at 38 – Humble Dollar
Where do millionaires keep their money? – Of Dollars and Data
Entertainment versus investing – A Wealth of Common Sense
Do you know how to find lost pensions? – Which
Is hiking rates in the face of supply shocks counterproductive? – KoI
Risk and regret – Morgan Housel
The difference between active income and passive income – Financial Samurai
Deep dive into the past and potential future returns of the [US] 60/40 portfolio – CAIA
Academic evidence of insider dealing disguised by trading using ETFs [Research] – SSRN
Naughty corner: Active antics
The UK has more than its share of 30-baggers – Schroders
S&P 500 CAPE valuation and forecast for 2023 – UK Dividend Investor
The core principles of momentum investing – Validea
The AI bubble of 2023 – The Reformed Broker
Different levels of mistake: overpaying versus over-gearing – The Rational Walk
Short-selling mini-special
The art of shorting – Net Interest
Marc Cohodes short selling strategy explained – Macro Ops
Kindle book bargains
How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford – £0.99 on Kindle
The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo – £1.99 on Kindle
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – £1.99 on Kindle
The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data by David Spiegelhalter – £1.99 on Kindle
Environmental factors
The enormous heat pumps warming cities – BBC
Battle of the botanic gardens – Guardian
The ESG investing backlash is having an impact [Video] – FT via YouTube
Astrophysicists propose mining the moon to send Earth-shading dust into space – Guardian
HS2 miscalculating impact on nature, wildlife studies find – BBC
How did millions of dead crabs wind up in the abyss? – Hakai
Off our beat
iPhones are made in hell: three months inside China’s iPhone city – RoW
Value investing – Indeedably
Climate ripples and the rise of the right [Superbly scrolling content] – NPR
The four horseman of the tech recession – Stratechery [Also see visualizations]
11 thoughts on living in 2023, from a follower of stoicism – Ryan Holiday
Are we racing towards an AI catastrophe? – Vox
And finally…
“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”
– Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor
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I work in an office, and its been great to have the have the option to work from home at least a couple of days a week, but it would drive me insane to work from home all the time :D. Its always nice to get a bit of office banter when your in. It has definitely effected UK Reit RGL which has a portfolio of mainly office space
@TI typo – sorry to be a pain again but “loathe” should be loath?
@Factor — No apology necessary, I very much appreciate it thanks! (@TA gets me spotting his typos, I’m on my lonesome…) Fixed now.
I work in central London and I’ve switched from almost 100% office to almost 100% home. The commute is the biggest put off but there is no-one there now. Global teams, shrunk teams mean that London is pretty empty.
Plus the one of cost and my home equipment being better than office now means I have very little incentive.
I’m close enough to retirement that I don’t really care now but for those younger I wonder how the office can be made an enjoyable social place to be in again.
My company’s head office is currently at 13% occupancy. The CEO is pushing for people to come back in but all his senior reports prefer working from home so there’s mixed messaging throughout the organisation, meanwhile the rank and file are left to just figure out their own arrangements.
Thanks for the links, TI.
I do wonder about wfh and what it means for employment overall. The patrician employer doling deskspace, benefits, regular salary and demanding work, time, presence is a throwback to the Victorian mill, but much of our law and social support has build around it. We need to be careful if we are to tear down the commute not to find ourselves in a societal vacuum.
Do we lose a sense of belonging in a firm if we don’t have a “place”? My desk is our hotdesk – where is my office Swiss Cheese plant and photo of the dog kept? But the employer will surely demand his reduced rent dividend from wfh just as the employee saves on travel costs. Do we feel disconnected from our co-workers if we don’t see them in the flesh, break bread with them, moan about the shared failed washing up?
As an employer, I worry about management. Are staff actually capable of avoiding the distractions of wfh and putting a shift in? Lord knows most of us aren’t strong enough to avoid twitter and the like sucking pur attention away. Do I measure outputs effectively? Can all roles be put in a box? If you can work from home, can I offshore your work? Can I ensure that new staff share our vision and culture if we don’t immerse together?
I have to dismiss one worker and work to save another this month as I wrestle with adaption to wfh. The irony is that I now find myself in the office more as a result of dealing with it all.
@dazzle — The new equipment is nice but will age. I suppose companies will replace that then, but I wonder if eventually more WFH will eventually require allowances for refurbishing home offices or similar? At least as an incentive, the way people used to get a company car?
@Ash — Yes I get the sense a lot of this is happening despite not because of any strategy. 13% is very low…
@mathmo — You’re welcome, great to have a comment from you again, it’s been a while! 🙂 And I agree, even as a fully evangelizing prophet of this direction of travel, I do wonder how much we’re ‘coasting’ on the momentum of the old order? One friend of mine got a job just before the pandemic, worked with the company for 18 months, and then left. This person never met anyone from the company in the entire time, and felt this was a huge source of friction and uncertainty. I’ve worked for (even ran!) companies without an office, but they were set-up that way from day one. Companies born of a different culture/era are going to need to find ways to on-board and integrate staff who won’t just ‘pick things up’ when the only co-worker to hand is their cat.
During lockdown, the company I work for didn’t renew the lease on the London HQ office, thus saving a ton of money. The 30 or so people down there have been working from home 100% but I hear that after 3 years of being office-less, they will be leasing workspaces soon, to mixed emotions apparently.
I’m still happy with my 4 days wfh, 1 day in office, although it’s so busy now on the day I go in that I’ve not been getting my usual hot desk, have to get in extra early to bag it!
The hybrid working seems to work for the company, with people still doing their core 9-5 hours.
If I was ever asked to go back into the office 5 days a week again, I would do it though I’d prefer not to. However I can’t see this happening, as neither my boss nor any of my team members are in the UK so it doesn’t matter to them where I work from.
Yes as someone that works from home pretty much permanently I’ve felt very disconnected from a new company I’ve joined . I think a certain amount of face to face time is a must for alot of people though not all. Flexibility is key
Working from home makes your home (or at least the part of it you work from) liable for capital gains tax when you sell. When more people understand the tax implications its attractiveness might fall off.
Actually, let me rescind my last comment about CGT – I’ve just remembered when I last looked this up I was self-employed! Perhaps it doesn’t apply to those with employers ….
I didnt know Glycerol was used in heat pump networks, I’ve only used Glycol. Thanks @TI for linking that.
At the risk of getting my head in a basket I wonder if the great increase of women at all levels in the workplace is a contributing driver
The house husband and and/or the 50% contributing male to household chores and child raising remains elusive
Being a woman still often means looking after a working man,running a house and being primary child carer-not feminism as envisaged in my book
Partime work and certainly doing as much as possible from home can aid managing this potentially heavy work load
I speak with some knowledge as the father of two married daughters with children in senior jobs in medicine and the prison service
Medicine and Prisons require on site/workplace attendance so are not perhaps the best examples but both girls certainly work part time
The effect of so many women it the workplace especially at senior levels is work in progress as no society to my knowledge has been in this position before
Possibly a major contributor to the falling birth rate ?
xxd09
On WFH, this has been commonplace in IT for decades and one perhaps not entirely desirable outcome is that WFH soon becomes WFA (work from anywhere) because it opens an industry up to a much more global labour pool.
So, don’t be surprised if 0% time in the office becomes 0% time full-stop, when your role is outsourced to someone in a much lower-cost country!
I started a new role in March 2020, a week or so before everything changed, and have been working from home ever since.
Actually quite a few life transitions have happened since then, I moved out of London back up to the midlands, bought a house, got a driving license, bought a car. If anything, the pandemic shook me out of the trap of renting in London for years and remaining in kidulthood. I’m even planning on painting the walls in my house! Imagine that!
The office in London is open for those who want to go in but I’ve just never bothered, most of my team is spread across Europe and I don’t see a reason to pay £90 for a train ticket (or a 2-3 hour+ drive down the M1…) to sit on video calls.
One of the biggest treats has been no commute, I used to trudge to work on the Northern and Central Line every single day. £160 a month, over 11+ years. I reckon over the course of my time down there I spent over £20k just on transport costs alone, on top of the £100k+ going to my landlord….and then that’s not even discussing the hundreds, possibly thousands of hours spent sat (or mostly standing) on the tube every day
So yeah, I’m a big fan of the WFH train.
The genie is out of the bottle for me as far as working from home is concerned. The large company I work for has implemented a 60% rolling average for office attendance. However, this is more suitable for some roles where as others it’s not possible at all as they depend on being in a specific location (factory’s and installation sites etc.) This has added a fair amount of conflict and word has it management are looking to turn the clock back. Our competitors are a very mixed bag, some 100 % remote, others 100% office. If I’m forced to go into 5 day attendance I’ll be seeking alternative employment. 3 hours a day unpaid lost to commuting is effectively a reduction in salary as well as an increase in stress and time with the kids I won’t ever get back.
Worked from home (including managing a team) for more than a decade. I was an early adopter, and it has mostly worked well. But when it goes wrong, it goes very wrong indeed. I completely misjudged the politics of being an outlier/early adopter – and there were a few individuals in head office whose bullying made my life a misery for quite a few years.
I’ve outlasted them, and thanks to the pandemic and being very comfortable with working from home, regained all that I lost. Better still, I’ve used the opportunity to reduce my working hours still further – putting the work/life balance firmly in the life corner.
I work in a role which is pretty much 100% office based, but in an organisation that has a whole range of %ges. It’s a massive problem as a middle manager, because some junior members of staff in my teams seem to think they should be allowed to wfh more than is possible with their duties. When i question it they claim they need CPD time. The fact that senior management in my area are clearly taking the piss in some instances and have declined to give any clear guidance around WFH only compounds the problem. I’m completely sick of it.
All the benefits have been discussed and I agree with. But I think they apply more to experienced workers then those just starting their careers.
Couldn’t imagine being in my first job trying to learn the skills and mindset required to be successful sat alone in my bedroom with no experienced colleagues around to guide/coach me.
As someone who has worker part time (3 days per week) in an engineering role for 15 years, this whole wfh thing has infuriated me, potentially for slightly selfish and anecdotal reasons but I believe not without justification.
There are some jobs that are just better done in an office/commercial building. The initial lockdown when I was forced to wfh was absolutely horrible for me. I like to have the equipment around me that I need, and also I struggled immensely with work life balance and ended up gifting my employer additional hours across the other 4 days at home.
When I could get back to the office, I jumped immediately.
Anyway – so far so good. But my colleagues indeed, did not. They have continued hybrid working or in some cases not coming back at all. Now, good for them you say. I don’t actually have much issue with that.
But some are definitely taking the p*ss, and have even privately admitted as much to me. They are absolutely working less, and managing their external responsibilities during those hours.
And I salute them for doing so actually – companies don’t reward productivity or generally operate meritocratically as they should so have at it if you can get away with it. But I am productive and on 60% of a full time wage, and do stuff like a muppet at home on those other two days because I have some responsibilities that benefit from a bit of remote management.
I guess this is my issue really, and it was cathartic to write it but I’m 100% going to ask for 70% of my full time wage very soon, because i am becoming very resentful of them collecting a full time wage for a not entirely dissimilar working pattern.
I made some mistakes in the above post so I’ll do a tl;dr
* I work 3 days a week, in the office for 60% of my full time wage.
* like an idiot, I do stuff on my unpaid days at home – not a huge amount, but enough that I’d say I probably put in an extra half day out of some bizarre loyalty/work ethic over the other 4 days
* colleagues have adopted hybrid working, get paid full time and have privately admitted taking care of personal responsibilities on their wfh days, but still get 100% of their full time wage now.
I am p*ssed off, and now will demand 70% at least of a full time wage. Especially as they haven’t given any cost of living rises either for 18 months. If they don’t agree to that, then I will force myself not to do any external work at bare minimum.
My experience mirrors @Timmo of others lapping up the benefits.
I imagine the sort of mind that makes its way to the c-suite will quickly turn to the fact that:
– if a job can be done 90-100% remotely it can be done in South Africa, India, the Philipines or indeed Serbia
– if a job requires 1/2 days a week in central london the employee does not need to be paid a premium to live in the SE of the uk
The laptop class is replacable in the way the physical working class isn’t
Two decades as a wfh exponent? Novice.
I started working the majority of my time at home, away from the office in the mid-1990s. Dual ISDN links (total 128kbps) anyone?
Not a WFH fan though I recognise I’m in a small minority (my team are mostly 5 days WFH).
On the work side everything has become very siloed, uncallaborative, and I’m not sure what some people actually do. There’s no feeling of any collective endeavour. On the home side I live in a 1 bed flat, and spending 24h in the same space without so much as a separate living room to go in is quite taxing. My ‘desk’ is barely larger than my laptop.
I appreciate some of this is circumstance, but I don’t think it works for me. My employer is planning on selling the office, but hopefully public sector inefficiency will intervene, and will if history is any guide.
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Not surprisingly many of these problems are the same as pre-pandemic, but I suppose they were being felt more by those of us in pioneering mode.
For example when I did do a stint at an employer (who overall I liked very much) in the early 2010s, I agreed at the interview stage that I would be allowed to do at least one day working from home a week. Indeed this employer in theory allowed much more working from home than that, provided work was completed to standard, as well as various other perks such as notionally unlimited holiday.
In practice though I ended up being asked not to do my day at home every week — which I was diligently scheduling in — and this turned out to be because of issues with a co-worker, not me. Rather than tackle that specifically, blanket restrictions (/normal hours) were instated. (The unlimited holiday perk was similar. Hard to take holidays if the schedule/workflow wasn’t flexible enough to allow it in practice without something breaking).
So management is definitely a key factor here. Higher ups doing whatever they like — and failing to communicate even by example — is another common issue. Not just with the hours but also with remote working in general.
My ex would sit in Zoom meetings for 6-8 hours a day in 2020, basically listening to her manager ‘manage’ by asking 3-4 direct reports or other co-workers what they thought about this and that. (I heard some of these dire sessions for myself).
One day of calls memorably ended with her being quizzed on why she was behind on her own tasks — 90% of which were production orientated and needed her to be in a quiet undisturbed room for at least a few hours once a day.
@Neverland
Interesting points which I’ve considered quite frequently.
Regarding the London premium, I’ve seen a softening of this recently in my industry. London used to achieve a 30% uplift now it’s 5-10% over Birmingham and Manchester.
I see your other point, outsourcing to abroad, as much an opportunity as a possible threat. I’ve engaged with several businesses and individuals offering professional services from abroad and without exception they have been hugely subpar. Indeed our business tried to set up a business delivering relevant services abroad and it failed massively.
So, at the moment, the competition is just not there. The opportunity side of that there is clearly a requirement for training and supervision should services relocate. Possibly opportunities for would be relocators from the uk to do this or indeed set up their own business leveraging this.
Slightly less so there’s also the opportunity to relocate within the uk – more rural location, lower cost of living area etc.
I agree laptop workers are more replaceable that those physically tied to a place. However I think that’s also limited to lower skilled of knowledgeable professions at the moment. That will change over time but I don’t think it’s an immediate threat to most.
What I want to know is how do the young pups learn the ropes in their isolated silos?
Thinking back to the crummy bedsits in London of my youth, WFH would have been a rotten experience in my twenties. OK I was working on broadcast gear which was definitely in a physical location, so it wouldn’t have come up. My experience of WFH towards the end of my career was fine when I had my own house etc, but in the early days it wouldn’t have been that great – Zoom isn’t gong to work that great if I don’t have a 50p for the electricity meter, or it trips out partway through the call.
I hope employers running WFH shops give some thought to that, because otherwise they may find they have a company that doesn’t work properly in a few years if the intake isn’t acclimatised to the working procedures. In no way is it intractable – after all go back before the industrial revolution and most people worked in a home area, but it is a rather different world, skillset and scale nowadays. There’s no WFH office worker’s equivalent of the medieval guild system that trained raw recruits into master masons.
Im with Ermine on this – being in the office and able to interact in person with more knowledgeable colleagues, raise issues, ask questions, listen in, on an ad hoc basis, can be invaluable for those still learning the ropes. My learning would have been slow indeed without these opportunities. Knowledge shared even in chance discussions can often turn out to be crucial in the learning process.
Beyond simple stuff like keeping a team on a shared task with a clear common view of a shifting target (easier with daily stand ups, harder with fully asynchronous self service contact and WFH).
There is an issue with promoting cultural shared identity “a distinctive sense of *us* as a group working hard to succeed within our industry. Peer respect and expectations and enforcement of standards (attendance, effort, quality, mutual support, helping out across organisation if asked – whatever it is in context (e.g. not breaking the build in software land) – that may require you to make a bit more personal effort because of perceived obligations to the team and your reputation within it. This is either a good thing and positive management technique or a hideously exploitative psychological trick to exploit unpaid overtime hours according to your perspective. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. This is hard to do anyway. And harder with a very low touch setup (all WFH).
More important is the WFH defect around inexperienced folk learning on the job from the more experienced. Working in teams – face to face. Watching. Pictures and explaining. Stories. In the moment and around it (coffee, travel, reflection upon events). Apprentices. Mentors.
For sure youth is no guarantee of innovation nor age of wisdom. Cheap slogans aside – people who know a job in good times and bad and have faced difficult customers and adversity of one kind or another – have something to show and teach the young and idealistic about handling these situations when they come up. To assert otherwise is to redefine “the job” of the elders to something smaller and narrower. Something important around corporate memory and resilience is then lost once an organic process of generational transmission and renewal stops working. Task process uber alles types of a Taylorist bent won’t care as they have their pet solution for everything and people needing to know things is an irritant.
And yet – having grown up with (culturally robust to a fault) face to face business practices i.e. as a dinosaur – I would say that wouldn’t I.
It is the job of youth in possession of a little knowledge to be arrogantly overconfident. And through overconfidence to over reach. And through over reaching to have to stretch to recover and thus to learn by attempting something difficult failing at it educationally and then digging it out. And to know better how to proceed the next time. And so we begin anew as a fresh cohort of bright young things enters stage left.
It is the job of leadership to allow as much of that as is consistent with growth and dynamism and to inject a little rigour, mentoring and other support so that the most obviously insane loss making risk taking gets filtered out so that the organisation is financially viable as well as a fun place to work.
Another link for this week – the Treasury Committee grilling the Bank of England about inflation and interest rates:
https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/297352c0-d18d-4ba9-9bcc-6f5e95e5d9b8
This was reported quite widely but it’s interesting to hear it in full. I’ve watched the first third or so and I am waiting for someone to point out that Brexit might just be a factor in our tight labour markets…
@NL – As a member of the laptop class, I’ll happily be outsourced and retire comfortably, but in my experience it’s been other countries outsourcing to my UK based companies. They seemingly can’t get the quality elsewhere.
@gmo My last CEO was an champion of “culture eats strategy for breakfast” – and stripped out an entire layer of strategic leaders to prove his point. The result was the most toxic work culture for nearly two decades of working for the firm. Further every decision was now funnelled up to Director level – including signing off on tweets. It was truly hilarious to be in the situation of being paid the same as I ever was with near zero accountability and about a third of the responsibilities I’d previously had.
I’m with G above, I often get called in to sort out the mess or help fix problems that people in other countries have either created or cannot solve themselves. And sometimes their productivity is about a fifth of UK staff, so the maths just doesn’t stack up.
I’m sure some bean counters in the company would love to offshore even more UK people looking at things in one dimension only e.g. salaries, but they cannot.
I’m now almost past caring if I get offshored or not, although another 5 years would be good first.
That said I do think the offshore threat will keep a disinflationary pressure on salaries over the medium to long term for UK based remote workers.
So good luck if you have locked in a London/South East level salary. Maybe don’t expect to keep up with CPI going forward.
As to the whole WFH in terms of corporate culture and policy, I agree with points made by both pro and antis made in comments above. Specifically the differences for experienced old hands vs new joiners who struggle to learn at home.
Hybrid working structure is very much a case of mixed messages at the company I work for. Some people in HR and legal, and old school presenteeist managers, are trying to push a 3 days in the office minimum.
While other senior managers in the departments that actually “do the work” are much more relaxed, and don’t mind if some individuals work almost 100% from home, depending on the exact nature of the role and the fact there is often geographic dispersal that negates the point of going into an office anyway.
There is also a realisation that the cost of several expensive office leases could tip the balance, especially for smaller regional offices where the number of staff present at any one time could be in low single figures.
The big swanky London office will stay, but maybe no need to expand to take on another floor if staff numbers rise.
Anyway, I’m staying out of Commercial Property REITs for a while as this and the rising cost of borrowing are likely to continue to re-rate them over the next couple of years.
Re: YF report on Scotland taxation – no surprise to see the politically/fiscally biased IFS lamenting a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/we-need-talk-about-institute-fiscal-studies/
And if there really is an “exodus” of wealthy Scots to England? Bye!
Ref:…. previous post about interest rates on cash held in Vanguard account.
Looks like Vanguard have taken steps to spoil the fun…., I today received an email from them….., looks like they are limiting the interest rate to 2.2%. Anything above that that they earn themselves from account holders cash, they’ll hold onto.
@trufflehunt I got that message too from Vanguard. I initially thought it was spam due to the grocer’s apostrophe in the title
> We’re updating our terms and condition’s
so after reading your post I followed the link in this missive, which does go to Vanguard. The full skinny is on here
https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/need-help/answer/will-i-receive-interest-on-cash-held-in-my-account