Is the property market coming back to life?

0:02Lee Boyce: Welcome to This Is Money podcast sponsored by Trading 212. Download the Trading 212 app today and open a cash ISA with promo code TIM to get the 12-month bonus promo rate of 4.56%. Terms apply. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Lee Boyce today is Helen Crane. And coming up, after years of stagnant sales and plummeting prices, is the housing market about to take off again? Also today, the secret savings accounts from some of the big banks offering triple the interest. Lee will tell us how to find one which can earn us hundreds extra a year. Crane is back on the case, this time tackling a bodged£11 ,500 heat pump.

0:40Lee Boyce: And another A-level results day has come and gone. We'll take a look at the best apprenticeship options, plus the best paying jobs you don't need a degree for. Don't forget, we'll stay up to date with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. But first, after four dismal years of stagnant sales and falling prices, could the property market be about to make a comeback? Well, yes. According to the experts, this is Money I've Spoken To. We know calling the bottom of any market is notoriously difficult. So what makes them so sure? And what should buyers and sellers do to get the best deals?

1:14Lee Boyce: Welcome, Lee. Welcome, Helen. Helen, just give us a little history. What's happened to the property market in recent years?

1:22Helen Crane: so it's been quite flat essentially this is quite sounds quite boring to say doesn't it things have just been very stagnant i suppose is is the word so everyone remember during the pandemic we had this huge boom where you know everyone wanted to move house people wanted to move to the country they wanted a bigger garden they had some cash flacing around because they hadn't been able to go anywhere or do anything. And it led to this real housing market boom, up until about the end of 2022. Since then, it's just been very small house price rises, the house price index is coming in saying no growth whatsoever, 0 % in some cases, 1%, some very slight falls, some months, but you know, certainly not a drastic crash.

2:16Helen Crane: And I think that's important to say actually there's been a bit of sort of doom talk about the housing market and you know it certainly hasn't been going great guns at all and house prices haven't been growing but they haven't really been falling i mean the exception is flats which we've written about a lot before at this is money that they are in some areas going down but that's more to do with these specific situations around things like leasehold cladding service charges so you know that that's a bit of a separate sort of situation. What we're seeing now, according to the experts that we've spoken to for this piece, is that maybe it's hit the bottom and it's about to start going back up again.

2:58Helen Crane: So these experts are saying that essentially people have been putting their lives on hold. You know, I think we sometimes forget that behind these house price figures are real people, you have real lives, and they have reasons to move house. So, you know, you might have got a job in a different area that's further away from your house so you've got a commute that's a pain or you know you might be a family and want to have another child and you don't have enough space like people do look at the housing market and they do think you know is this a good time is this a bad time to sell my house is this a good time to buy am I going to get a good price but ultimately you know these are people with lives and ambitions and plans and I think what these experts are saying is basically they've got to a position where the housing market doesn't look like it's necessarily changed very much for a long time.

3:46Helen Crane: And they're thinking enough is enough. Look, let's just get on, let's crack on and let's move. And that's been helped a little bit, or these experts think it will be helped a little bit by possible interest rate cuts.

4:01Lee Boyce: So Lee, it's sort of, this thing to Helen feels a bit, to use a popular term, a bit vibey, you know? Where's the cold hard stats?

4:09Georgie Frost: where's the cold hard stats show me it's gone a bit vibey all right i can i can point out i think georgie a couple of really key stats of what's going on at the moment and looking for those green shoots i think in terms of house prices which it depends where you stand as well doesn't it because if you are um a first-time buyer you know you're kind of hoping that house prices might be you know continuing to be falling in in real terms if you're someone that's selling a house or buying a house it's all about that premium of um you know you might not be selling for as much which is what you were expecting.

4:38Georgie Frost: But that trade up should also be cheaper than what was previously on offer. So you should be basically spending less. You might be making less on the house you're selling, but you're hopefully spending far less than you would have been to buy the kind of rising up property. So next, stats. You want stats. OK, so let's paint a picture here. As of July, average property just a shade under£300 ,000. That's according to Lloyd's. Only 0.1 % more than a year ago. That's the slowest rate of annual growth since November 2023. And if you factor in inflation, the average UK property has fallen by around 15 % in real terms in the last four years.

5:16Georgie Frost: In London and the South, that rises to 20 % or more. So property actually has got a bit cheaper. But as Helen was talking about there, the pandemic boom was absolutely bonkers. It was a crazy time. The property market just went ballistic. and this is the aftermath of that and to be honest an aftermath that i think was quite easily easy to predict so more green shoots here i think actually one of the key metrics we talk a lot about house price indexes and we talk about how much property is worth according to a raft of these nationwide has a a good barometer here which is the house price to earnings ratio and it's quoted quite a lot because it's quite an important thing and it shows you how affordable property is at the current time it's actually uh below the 25 year average it's at 5.6 times so the average property is 5.6 times average annual salary of someone in full-time work if you look back in the stats and look at nationwide here if you go to 2022 it was it was touching seven uh and before the last time it really peaked out like that was before the financial crisis which shows you just quite how bonkers everything was and in the spell before the pandemic between 2015 and 2021 it was hovering between five and a half and six so we've we've gone back down it's gone back down so it's become the last time it was this low was in 2013 and that means that essentially it has gone a little bit cheaper to buy a home then you have to look at mortgage rates a lot of what's gone on especially in the last six months but you can go back a little bit further than that with this trust and then the craziness of when mortgage price mortgage rates spiked and we're still kind of in the unknown of what's going to happen with interest rates right so there's still lots of talk that interest rates might go up but there's some traders that are saying actually do you know what rates are still going to be cut they're going to be cut next year and could fall to three percent in 2027 that would see mortgage rates fall by percentage point that would give a lot of confidence into the market and would probably see a glut of people looking to move and looking to buy and you can see something like that would have a huge effect and of course the real big one is something that we can't predict Georgie and that happens in two months time and that is the budget and unfortunately we're going to hear the word budget a little bit more over the coming months but we don't know what could be contained in that budget at the moment there's a lot of nervousness towards the top end of the market.

7:50Georgie Frost: You only have to look at the Renters' Right Act and lots of landlords are deciding to sell up because they're worried about how that's all going to play out and what's going to happen. Then we've had all of this talk around mansion tax and reform over stamp duty and council tax,

8:06Lee Boyce: which is kind of putting people off potentially.

8:09Georgie Frost: If you're buying a plus£1.5 million home, which is a very small market, but it trickles all the way down and you're paying a stamp duty bill or a near six-figure stamp duty bill, and then it gets reformed, and talking about, you know, then he forks out all of that money. And all of that just adds to the uncertainty across the whole market. But we've got some experts in here that I think have given some really good advice. And one of the pieces of advice I'm trying to hunt it down here is Craig Fish, his broker, who says it's better to buy in the dip than wait for prices to start rising again. He says, I'm telling clients not to wait for a starting gun that isn't coming if the numbers work today they'll likely work better than waiting for a recovery that's already pricing by the time it's obvious as we've pointed out in this podcast quite a few times it does take a notoriously long amount of time to buy a house especially in england and wales the process can take absolutely ages you know you're talking anywhere from four months to a year depending on the chain depending on what nasties come up in any kinds of surveys people get nervous and pull out all of those kind of things are you know well in play if you are someone's interested in buying um you know you're going to want to see how desperate sellers are in your local area so you know right move and zoop are the obvious ones but there's a lot of properties uh the supply and demand has been off kilter for quite a while there's quite a lot of properties that have been sat on the market for quite a bit it is time for sneaky offers and never be too too polite if you want something go after it um and you never know what someone might accept for it but to reiterate what what helen's saying it has been a very stagnant uh market in terms of property prices in terms of sales in transactions a lot of that has been uncertainty from uh the iran conflicts mortgage rates uh the labor government potentially bringing in um you know taxes that we're not too sure about yeah but the scenario is if labor don't do an awful lot in the budget in terms of the property market and reforming council tax stamp duty and if interest rates you know these are big big ifs and big buts but if interest rates did come down and you're starting to say that mortgage costs come down by 25 people are flying again house prices start inching up we're still not building enough homes on the whole a lot of people just sitting on their hands at the moment because they're worried to move and don't want to rock the boat but i think this is reiterate what mr fish says if the finances work now and you're ready to move there's no point in hanging around and look i know i've mentioned this podcast i moved house earlier this year and i you know i was riddled with doubt you're riddled with doubt like any kind of big life-changing decision i was moving my wife and two young children and you're constantly battling yourself saying is this the right thing to do Should I really be doing this?

11:05Georgie Frost: What could change? What could happen? And ultimately, you've just got to swallow it down and go, you know, you could be doing that forever. So anyway, I think that's what's going on, Georgie. I think there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of kind of waiting to see if what happens with property prices, what happens to mortgage rates, what happens to interest rates, what happens to any kind of announcements that come in. You mix all of that together and you can see why we're at where we're at.

11:27Lee Boyce: You can. And I've always found this a little bit difficult, not saying the experts in your piece are not absolutely legitimate and know a heck of a lot more about this than I do. I do love the fact that one of them is called Fish. When have we last heard of Fish? Get a wrong prediction. You might be a little bit young for that one, Lou. I just think that given, like you said, we've got a budget in a couple of months' time, mansion taxes, all of these sorts of things, it's very, very hard to call what will happen next for the property market. and it feels like, yeah, I think there's a lot of vested interest and people and experts wanting it to pick up.

12:03Lee Boyce: It's very difficult as well if you are either buying or selling a home because if there is speculation that this could pick up, obviously you are not going to want to sell at reduced price now and you're not going to want to buy at the future price that's going to be higher. So what do you do? I mean, it is just about if you need a house and you need to sell, just do it.

12:23Georgie Frost: It's a bit of a mind bender. It is, and it's such a huge decision, and it's such a huge upheaval for people. I can totally understand it. Can I also just say in this piece that we've got Craig Fish, and yes, I am too young to remember that, Georgie, given that I would have been one when the hurricane came in. Of course, I've watched a thousand programs on Channel 5 about it since. But we've got Craig Fish in this story, and we've also got Nicholas Finn, and I was making call. You fish and Finn.

12:52Lee Boyce: So stick with it through Fish and Finn.

12:54Georgie Frost: as well I'd say but in all seriousness you know you only have to look elsewhere and you get different views from different brokers and from different mortgage experts who will say property prices are going to continue to struggle are going to continue to remain low there there's wealthy you know there's wealth there's excess in the country and that trickles all the way down you know in terms of you know for example overseas buyers and it all has a big impact and and trickle on effect you could find another set of experts that would tell you the opposite thing i think what i'm trying to we're trying to get out here is that we're looking for those green shoots uh and i think that the nationwide um affordability index is a big part of that um and also you know looking at these stats as well in 2022 house prices were 20 times the typical yearly rent and that's now falling to 16 times and that's based on official figures you know that still sounds a lot um but it's dropped and that makes it more feasible you know kind of option for renters potentially looking and scrambling to get on and also there's a number of uh mortgage lenders big mortgage lenders rightly or wrongly who are loosening up the goalposts for people to get onto uh the mortgage ladder so you know go past a poster every morning on the train a big lloyd's poster saying five thousand pound house deposits you know we're back in 1996 i think it's become easier for first-time buyers to jump that hurdle of getting a deposit together now.

14:21Georgie Frost: I think what's holding people back more is the fear of making the wrong decision. And seeing things like new builds and price of new builds struggling, flats have become very out of fashion. People are nervous about buying flats. You know, typical first-time buyer properties. Again, adds all into the mix of uncertainty and what's happening with prices of homes of all descriptions.

14:45Lee Boyce: Quite, Lee, quite. Right. Wanting more from your savings? If you do, you need to turn a little bit detective. Big banks are now paying top rates on easy access savings accounts with deals over 4%, but you won't find them on their websites or in their branches, if you can even find their branches. So how can you discover these secret accounts that can reportedly earn you£350 more in yearly interest on£10 ,000 of savings than traditional accounts? Lee, secret accounts.

15:16Georgie Frost: yeah i mean it sounds more exciting than what it is we've made this this kind of sound like james bond or something you know and this is this is just about getting better savings deals at the same banks that you probably have a current account with or hold savings with so let me explain there are big banks that are offering much better easy access savings deals under different brand names than under their main name so nat west has a new digital savings brand called first active and i must admit i hadn't heard of first active and it sounded a little bit like a gym and it also sounded a little bit like first direct and i was a bit confused first active not sure what that's all about but that is a new digital savings brand from nat west barclays offers accounts through tesco which it took over a while back santander has got kahoot and Lloyd's MBNA which is more kind of associated with credit cards but it does offer savings now and HSBC top accounts are now being offered by savings platform Raisin who we know very well This Is Money it's a savings platform where you can go and mix and match and put the savings in and still get the FSCS protection of£120 ,000 per account and hopefully not forget that your savings are you know basically not earning very much helps you keep on top of it so some of these best deals and then that west uh first i first active i said first i don't know it's first active brand so this is an online only brand is offering four and a half percent uh you just need to open an account with one pound you link it to your current account doesn't have to be with nat west and a good thing about this account and why we're a fan of it is there's no limit on the number of withdrawals the number of easy access accounts now that are not strictly easy access drives me up the wall they will allow you one two three maybe four withdrawals before they penalize you and that doesn't feel very easy access so this is a pure easy access if you compare this to natwest's own flexible saver which is what it's offering customers you get one percent up to 25 grand which is absolutely shocking amount of money there's probably parts in there you'd be baffled that defined access saver that offers two and a half percent and this drops to 1.04 percent after free withdrawal so you can see why it's annoying you have to make sure you have a diary note to switch after a year though because it has a bonus of 1.5 percentage points on it that's quite big hsbc has got an easy easy access account 3.51 again no bonus or withdrawal catches you have to get that through raisin it's flexible saver on its own website 1.05 percent it does have an online bonus saver that pays 3.35 percent if you make a withdrawal though in any month that drops to 1.05 so pointing out exactly what i was just talking about uh barkishry tesco has an internet saver at 4.21 that's got a huge 3.16 percentage point bonus for a year got a market diary it offers just one percent on its everyday saver uh it offers 3.9 on its rainy day saver up of five grand that forces a 0.7 percent on anything more and Santander's got 4.52 percent simple saver through Kahoot again you've got to switch out after a year of you're earning just one percent and a lot of people do forget but it's still better than Santander's own everyday saver which pays just two percent and that forced the 0.9 percent and then Lloyd's has got a pretty dreadful.

18:40Georgie Frost: He taxes account for MBNA paying 0.75%. But it does have a very good one-year bond that's very near the top of the charts, 4.85 % against 3.8 % on its own website. Ultimately though, these accounts, Georgie, are good news for millions of saviors who want to stick to the big names for convenience and safety, even though other providers offer exactly the same level of both. But you'll be surprised how many people want to keep with a big bank banking brand because they trust them and think that their money is safer somehow with them it's just a shame that you have to kind of go online and search them out to find them rather than being pointed to them through a bank's own branch or you know as you say not many left or through online or through the app um you've got to go and search this out and that's why we've kind of labeled them secret and one more shout out here actually to a new account that's just launched um from spring it's called accelerate saver it's rocket to the top of our best buy charts it's offering five percent easy access on balances up to five thousand pounds so it is for people that are just starting out on the savings journey perhaps haven't got a huge sum it's a good place to keep your emergency cash no potentially because spring has done some research saying that three hundred and twenty two billion pounds in is in current accounts paying no interest and across all of this the average balance stands at just over four grand so if you are someone who's in that category you could slip your money into this easy access account this accelerator saver with a tenner minimum and if you do max out five grand you're going to get 250 quid interest which is better than it just floating around in your current account not doing an awful lot again accounts are protected by the fscs as are all the accounts that we ever mentioned on the website upside up to£120 ,000.

20:28Georgie Frost: It's part of Paragon Bank, which is a specialist lender and savings bank. But all of that points to much better rates available to savers. Rates are kind of holding up and there's no excuses to be getting an absolutely poor rate on your money.

20:44Lee Boyce: Which leads me on, Helen, to question. With the government doing this campaign to get everyone investing, one of the big problems that we have in terms of making our money work harder for us is all of this money, as Lee pointed out, that's in these, as Simon calls it, insult savings accounts. What do you think we could do there? What would incentivise people to get a bit more active with their savings?

21:05Helen Crane: It's so easy, isn't it, to just leave your savings in, especially if you have an account that's maybe in the same bank as your current account or something like that. It's so easy to just leave your money in there and think, oh, I'll switch it another day, you know, when I have a day off, when I get some time. I think making people aware of what their rate actually is, because a lot of the time you'll get a decent rate and then after a year or something it'll drop way down and you never get notified of that. So I think if there was a way to force banks when you've had a good rate and it drops down to a 0.something percent they have to send you an email and let you know that your rate has fallen and make it really clear how much you would have been earning and how much you will now earn.

21:48Helen Crane: As well as Lee said people can be a bit scared of these new names or put in your savings with a bank that you've never really heard of before. As you said, you know, you need to look out for FSCS protection. But smaller banks do have this, your money is protected to the exact same degree. But people have this kind of nervousness around going with the name that they haven't heard of. So I think maybe these banks need to point that out more. So your money's protected, really get it out there that there's kind of nothing to lose compared to a big bank you know it's one of those tasks that is is easy to kind of put off is it's like all switching isn't it but it you know it is it's very easy to do as i think lee said you know get onto this money get onto our savings rate tables it's right there in front of you all the best rates from small banks to you know big banks building societies right there in front of you so it you know takes a few minutes of your day but um it's uh yeah easy to do if you if you kind of

22:45Lee Boyce: find the time yeah worth it all right crane is back on the case this is a reader letter which i honestly shook my head reading this as i'm sure you did helen so we had a heat pump not me obviously installed by octopus last year at a cost of 11 and a half thousand pounds so not cheap Our experience with the heat pump, though, has been a disaster. Primarily as it only heats the home to a maximum of 18 degrees. Some rooms struggle to get above 12 degrees. Our home is only 20 years old and well insulated. The bills are now higher than they were before we had the heat pump installed and were up to 20 quid a day in the winter.

23:34Lee Boyce: Now, Octopus says the system wasn't designed to heat our home above 18 degrees. This was never mentioned to us and we would never have agreed to such low temperatures. Helen, well, well, well, well, 18 degrees.

23:52Helen Crane: It's really not that warm. So when I first mentioned this story around the office, there was someone that said, oh, 18 degrees, like that's fine. Just put a jumper on. No, absolutely not. For me, it's got to be in the 20s. it wasn't lee it was simon though lee was it lee so it wasn't lee simon lambert but lee you were thinking it i just admit it you were thinking it like on a really bitterly cold winter's day i'm i'm cracking it all up all the way up to 25 i'm sorry that's that's what i pay my heating bills for and if i want to if i want to sit on my sofa with temperature like i'm in somewhere in spain in July.

24:32Helen Crane: I'll absolutely do it.

24:33Georgie Frost: I'm sorry.

24:38Lee Boyce: So Octopus's argument then would not have washed with you, I sense.

24:43Helen Crane: Octopus and other companies that sell these heat pumps and, you know, these new systems to kind of heat your home in an eco-friendly and they say better way, you know, they do say your home will be warm as you like, it will be easier to control, it will be more comfortable cheaper and you know a lot of firms do make these really big claims to get people to sign up to getting a heat pump or getting solar panels and I think you know it's a big commitment so financially so this person they did get the£7 ,500 government grant so they paid£4 ,000 which is still a huge amount of money and when you pay that amount you expect not only a good service but obviously a product that actually works and they didn't get that at all absolutely you're standard when they said that some rooms don't even get past 12 degrees that's just what what is the point in this at all is it is absolutely shocking

25:40Lee Boyce: yeah but also 20 pounds per day as well like 20 pounds a day to heat your home to

25:47Helen Crane: yeah and it's important to say this is relatively new house 20 years old so it's fairly well insulated you know shouldn't have big gaps around sort of windows or door be kind of leaking energy it's not a huge house average size new build property that you could see on you know any estate in any any town around britain really so it should have worked obviously the reaction they got when they complained about this was was pretty outrageous as well you know octopus said well we did tell you when you signed up that it would only heat your home to 18 degrees why would anyone agree to that when they already had a gas boiler that heated their home to any temperature they would like why on earth would you say oh yeah sounds good great

26:34Lee Boyce: absolutely presumably octopus had the evidence that they well so their argument was that after

26:40Helen Crane: they had they had a sales rep come out and have these conversations around it and it wasn't mentioned then but when they signed their final contract they got a big document and it said that it was designed to heat bedrooms to 18 degrees but living spaces to I think 20 degrees so they they did say that you know in bedrooms it might only go to 18 degrees which I suppose is you know maybe okay you know you don't you're not spending all day in your bedroom hopefully um but you know going down to 12 degrees clearly still breaches that that agreement even if that that was the case so after I got in touch Octopus did send someone out to this person's house to work out why the system wasn't working properly you know it clearly wasn't doing its job and this had already been done by the way before I got in touch and they'd sort of had engineers around and and sort of been told oh this is you know this seems seems fine but they sent someone around again and they essentially found that some of the insulation in the roof wasn't kind of up to standard and that meant that the whole system essentially wasn't working properly.

27:53Helen Crane: But when you get one of these systems you know they do inspect your whole house, they make sure first of all that your home should be suitable for getting a heat pump and that it will work. So that kind of should have been done to begin with. They found out that the heat pump itself wasn't

28:08Lee Boyce: faulty but the home was losing more heat than it should have done because of uneven loft insulation

28:14Helen Crane: but you know this has been months since this person raised the problem this started off they got it installed in autumn last year and it's taken until now for it to be sorted and they're obviously looking in the face of another winter kind of being cold so you know octopus has taken a really long time to put this right and they have now said that they will not only carry out all the work in the house to make the heat pump system work properly. So they'll sort the loft insulation and make sure that their house can get up to the right temperatures. But they're also going to refund the£4 ,000 that they put in as a recognition of the problems they've had and the time it's taken to put it right.

28:57Helen Crane: So good news. But I do think it raises a wider issue around heat pumps and the promises that are made about them and how effective they are. I've already had a couple of other people get in touch with me to say you know I got a heat pump and it wasn't really what I expected so I think that's a really important point as people are being pushed to go green which don't get me wrong a good ambition to have you know save money be greener if it works no kind of problem with that but I do think people when they're being sold these things need to be told exactly what they're guessing and their expectations need to be managed or they need to be told this is how it will work in your home and they need to kind of be be told the truth about it so things like this don't end up happening

29:43Lee Boyce: lee i gestured about your 17 18 degrees but you can't get a quote-unquote heat pump 18 degrees that's what you're gonna get that's that's rubbish i want the choice to be warm or not

29:57Georgie Frost: yeah it's not good enough the part of this story as well is that some of the rooms are struggling to go above 12 degrees and that's just plain dangerous the thing is with heat pumps you get a kind of people that have had them installed and they'll say they're great and they work really well and then you have some people where it hasn't worked out so well i think one of the key things you need to do before considering a heat pump is a understanding if your property is suitable for a heat pump and be looking at the t's and c's as of anything any big financial commitment or big product or something that you're having done to your house and ensuring that a company isn't going to weedle out of something because they're buried somewhere in terms of conditions that actually this is exactly what this product should be doing and we should point out here as well that there is quite a lot of pressure um on you know households and companies um pushing heat pumps because our reliance on gas has been very much in the spotlight this year given the iran conflicts and the spike in wholesale gas prices.

30:54Georgie Frost: And the way that heat pumps work is that you don't need gas to make them work. And that's the whole idea of them. Basically, that's the green element of them. £11 ,500,£7 ,500 of that was covered by a grant from the government's boiler upgrade scheme. So they've put in foreground into this, a significant sum. But a huge part of that is being funded by a scheme. And again, that might be sharpening people's minds and focus, rightly or wrongly, to be pressurized into thinking that they've got to get one of these pretty soon because if that scheme ends i think it's going to be a very tough sound tough sell to get people to fork out 11 and a half grand versus four grand how much it's costing at the moment and that might be rushing decisions that might be sharpening people's minds as i say to think well i better get one now before the prices go up um but just make sure you know what you're signing up for and i'm not going to sit here and compete the poo poo um heat pumps and i think we've talked about heat pumps for the podcast before we have some people get in touch saying how much they like them uh you know and it's helped them save money yeah and all that kind of thing and it's only gonna these kind of cases though i would suggest they're probably only going to become more apparent uh in future years as more people get them installed like anything uh some won't work properly or shouldn't have been put in and i'm sure that we'll have more cases like these it's the owner should be on the company to make sure that they are, A, selling these properly and letting people know exactly what they're in for and B, if for some reason it isn't working as expected to make sure an engineer gets out and everything is sorted out and hunky-dory to make sure then that there's enough trust in people getting a heat pump.

32:37Georgie Frost: Because let's face it, well, Georgie, as in a lot of things in this world, word of mouth is crucial for something like this. If you had a neighbour or a friend just had a heat pump and they said, this is great, you should get one. It's currently£7 ,500 boiler upgrade scheme. Go for it. You might do it. If you've got a neighbour or a friend or whoever says, oh, I've got this heat pump and it's been a complete nightmare and some of the rooms haven't gone above 12 degrees, you go, well, I'll park that until someone makes me get one. So it's very crucial. The aftercare service is crucial on something like this.

33:07Lee Boyce: Absolutely, Lee.

33:07Georgie Frost: Right, finally.

33:09Lee Boyce: Now, I remember really distinctly, actually, when I was 18 years old, telling myself that I would never be as stressed as I was at that point because A-levels were hard and Georgie could not see beyond the hardness of those A-levels. But actually, on reflection, I do think little Georgie was right. I don't think I've ever experienced anything quite like that. To be fair, I did like all science A-levels and art. I did five or something. It was stressful. And I have probably never experienced anything quite like that mentally. So if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of teens who've just got their A-level results, do history as a degree.

33:53Lee Boyce: It won't come anywhere near to the stress of what you've just been through. I think I just about made maybe three lectures a week. Or you don't have to do that at all. You don't actually have to go to university. This Is Money have two articles on their website. Britain's best apprenticeships reveal top choices for high-paying careers with no degree needed and how to apply. And just to hammer home the point that you do not need to go to university. Well, I had a great time, by the way. The best paying jobs you don't need a degree for. And the best part of that article, by the way, for the rest of us who aren't 18, which I suspect is probably about 99.9 % of people listening, why midlifers looking for work after redundancy should apply too.

34:37Lee Boyce: So this one's for everyone. Lee, you wrote your column about it this week. was little lee stress during the a-levels have you experienced stress like that work related

34:48Georgie Frost: stress i mean nothing i'm really sorry to say but i was i was i was quite a naughty kid you're probably not surprised to hear and uh i kind of modeled through my gcses even though i was expected to do very well and i scraped through and i did fine i had a very much uh a year of growing up between year 12 and year 13 at sixth form where i realized that i should actually be putting in a lot more effort i just grew up um i think a lot of kids do at that age and took my a level was a bit more seriously i was way better prepared i always remember that motto that was in the sixth form common room fail to prepare prepare to fail and i kind of much better with my levels

35:25Lee Boyce: so you breezed through at least is that what you're saying well i'm not saying that i breezed

35:30Georgie Frost: through it but um i think i had a lot of teachers tearing their hair out because you know i kind of I wasn't I wasn't the greatest pupil um and I um I was always very focused though I was always very focused on what I wanted to do that's where the column was getting out in this is the I think a lot of uh our younger people at the moment have been quite wrongly kind of labeled you know this whole like snowflake generation and they're soft and all of this that and the other and there's been a lot of talk around neat so not an employment education or training that number's been growing of young adults that are kind of being labeled quite lazily in that category not realizing that it is actually quite a lot harder now i would suggest you know for example hospitality industry has been completely crushed down uh when i was at sixth form i worked in nightclubs hubs bars all sorts it's it's not easy out there but yeah i would say if you are someone that's done the a-levels but more realistically probably parents of someone that's um had someone that's had a-levels or gcscs recently and grand or if you've had grandchildren or relatives i think it's just really important that we help support and give confidence to people and young adults in that situation there'll be a mixture of excitement if you've done well be a mixture of feeling really bad potentially if you haven't done well and then you could read all the celebrity tweets them and i got no a levels and i'm absolutely fine which always comes across as kind of quite sickly and everything but there is a point to that you know isn't the be all and end all or no it feels like the be all and end all at the time and actually going back to you saying you've never been so stressed as a levels when i did my um my nctj which is the newspaper degree it was a six month fast track degree that i did after university university was a bit of a breeze if i'm being honest with you you know as you say three years could have been crushed down into six months pretty much it was more the social aspects and all of that kind of thing the newspaper degree was quite stressful i kind of got on top of everything the legal side of things all of those kind of things but the thing i struggled most of with was shorthand absolutely never been very good at languages i found languages the hardest thing i'm absolutely useless at french and spanish and all that kind of stuff and shorthand is almost like another language and i massively struggled with it and i remember failing one of the exams and i was really hard on myself and i remember going you're never going to be generous you can't do shorthand but you get over it you have a kind of You have a bit of time to sort of like digest it and realizing that at the time it feels like the most important thing ever.

38:02Georgie Frost: But then you get through it and realize that it's not. So in my column also, we're talking about there's loads of paths all of a sudden open up to you when you do your A-levels. Once you get your results and you have to decide. And it's a lot of pressure on young shoulders to decide whether you want to go to university, whether you want to do an apprenticeship, whether you just want to go straight into another job. and of course some young adults even still go and do a spot of traveling if their circumstances allow and they can do it and all of these options are good options and I would never talk anyone out of university just make sure that you know how the student loan system works arm yourself with all the knowledge young adults that are going to university now will have all of that information to have and actually Helen wrote a story today suggesting how many wealthy grandparents are paying for higher education for their grandkids it's become very expensive to go to university as long as you're fully aware of how that loan system works and what you might owe at the end of it and is it gonna i would say the the top question is is going to university this degree going to help you get a leg up in a career that you genuinely want to do and that's such a loaded

39:11Lee Boyce: question at 18 i mean it's very very hard to know so hardly so so so hard isn't it because it's

39:18Georgie Frost: options it gives you options it gives you options and that's why i'd never absolutely i don't know what i'm gonna be when i grow up late no well exactly i've still got friends now that are cruising into the four-week georgia i don't think they're ever going to know what they really want to do but they're fine they're absolutely fine you don't have to you don't have to have a conventional career you don't have to work in an office you don't have to go back to education there's there's you can go back to it there's loads of options when we were younger you had a few tv channels and like i had skybox you had a few more than that now you know it's like opening netflix and there's like 5 000 things that you can watch and you just flip through them all and never actually make it you've got too many choices and that's i think sometimes how things like this feel but we have got a couple of guys as you rightly said on the website uh about the best paying jobs you don't need to create more just to jump in there what is interesting and i hope

40:08Lee Boyce: you're going to lead on now obviously you're teeing it up beautifully but i had a conversation with my nephew and have done for a while now, a couple of years, and he's about 14. He's like, I don't think I'm going to go to Aunty Georgie.

40:20Georgie Frost: And I thought, oh, wow.

40:22Lee Boyce: Because, I mean, his parents both went to university. His auntie and uncle both went to university. His grandparents all went to university. For them, there is an option that actually, I think he's thinking about apprenticeships, that actually this is a genuine alternative. Apprenticeships, I think, is a really interesting one because in the past there was maybe a little bit of snobbery around it, but they have come into their own there are so many options out there now isn't there Lee

40:46Georgie Frost: there's there's there's a huge amount of options and also you know he's 14 years old he might change his mind you know you do change your mind like the wind there and again going back to to my school days Georgia no one gave me any advice I had no teachers saying you should go to university or you shouldn't go to university I remember one day I had a day left to apply and I just randomly picked six universities to apply for and got offers all of them never visited any of them and just pick one you know that is the kind of that is the kind of methodology i had no idea how much it was going to cost me no idea what was open to me all i knew very firmly uh even when i was at school and not sixth form was that i wanted to be a professional writer i wanted to be a journalist and just like clung on to that and that's the other thing we didn't it was quite a house of research things you know okay we had the internet but it wasn't quite the beast of what it is now and you can find answers through it very instantly i had no idea how to become a journalist no one told me what I needed to do or what what you know so that's the other thing again I'll go back to what I said at the start is putting an arm around your younger relatives and kind of helping steer them if you can into what it is that they have an interest in and what they're good at and as I said earlier as well not everyone's academic not everyone could basically go and do anything that they want to do it's all about trying to discover what your skill sets are and where you're going to kind of thrive and do well and i think a lot of that comes from a steer from older people workers that have been there done it um and you know can help out say apprenticeships let's get into the apprenticeship side of things they have become a lot more popular they can be quite difficult to get into popular ones because it's almost seen i think as a bit of a shortcut now of going work and going work for a really good big company and not have all of the saddling debt and some people don't see university debt as debt you know this is a tax that comes out of their salary you want to earn in over a certain amount of money and that's the one way you could look at it but you know you could be paying off for a very long time so you can understand why this has become more popular one of the big ones and i know someone that's done this um is accountancy however an accountancy apprenticeship is very popular the big four firms pwc e y deloitte came KPNG they all offer degree apprenticeships which allow you to work for an undergraduate master's degree while working and and most combine full-time employment with part-time university study and typically last three to four years I had my niece's partner did this and the exams to pass at one of these big fours that stressed in my back I've never seen anyone stressed and very difficult exams to pass and he found it very very difficult so there's a word of warning there that's it's not not necessarily an easier route just because you're getting a foot in the door other example banking's quite a big one and there's quite a lot of big banks that will offer apprenticeship style kind of work and there's roles in science I always think science is one of those that is a really important university degree you know our next generation of scientists you know need that kind of full-time education to get their head around you know whatever it is specialist that they specialism that they're going to get into uh but there are a lot of big science firms that do offer apprenticeships a lot of those are around um cambridge cambridge really is the hotbed uh for that kind of thing very you know one of the one of the world's leading uh kind of areas when it comes to when it comes to science tech and ai so again the other the other stress i think for young adults and it's getting fed through i think from all sorts of directions is the rise of ai and it's going to steal your jobs and all of that kind of thing i think that narrative is already getting quite worn and it's getting quite frustrating listen ai the power of it there's no doubt it's going to shift uh jobs roles certain things but it's also an opportunity and if you're a younger person who's very confident um with technology which a lot of young adults are um you should be frightened of it you should be looking to harness the power of it um and again there's apprenticeships in technology and and ai and engineering again i think it's a very common one um to think about an apprenticeship type of uh way uh bae rolls royce you know we've got lots of big companies at this this country that are proudly you know this country is proudly built on looking for the next generation of talent and apprenticeships are very popular for those kind of things and the other one we mentioned in here is Transport for London as well.

45:16Georgie Frost: They offer apprenticeships and they are, well, according to this article, slightly easier than the others to get into. So advice would be kind of thinking about what you're interested in and what kind of area it might be. And also the other thing we haven't mentioned really in this story is the kind of more like tradie work. So I'm talking about the next generation of builders, plumbers, carpenters, that kind of thing. is going to research how best to do it find some people that do that job already ask how they got into it and then make decisions from there trouble is i think sometimes there's that tendency in this country not to ask not to ask questions and not to go and get the right kind of advice and from people that have been there and done it and i speak from experience and lots of people that i are very willing to talk about how they got to where they're at.

46:13Georgie Frost: And you cannot deny that that kind of experience and that kind of advice is honestly worth its weight in gold.

46:21Lee Boyce: Quietly, absolutely right. Helen, the jobs you don't need a degree for, not just for young people.

46:28Helen Crane: And I think actually it's really heartening looking at this list because there's some really good jobs on there, jobs that look really interesting and really uh ai proof as well uh jobs like you know you'll learn a lot there'll be there'll be interesting jobs and so we've got number one metropolitan police officer starting salary 42 210 pounds a year there's a couple of routes into it so there's the police constable degree apprenticeship which takes three years and you actually get an undergrad degree on that route so this is an important thing to say as well you know some of these programs you do actually end up with a degree at the end of it as well if that's something that's important to you know having that qualification to to walk away with and the other route is a police constable entry program which is two years um that's more sort of practical training and you also get a professional qualification although it isn't a degree and once you're qualified as well so that's starting pay£42 ,000 at£59 ,000 once you're qualified.

47:33Helen Crane: So, you know, as I said, this isn't just jobs for entry level young people. That's a really sort of respectable salary for someone maybe returning to work as well. Second job on the list, working in recruitment at Hayes, starting salary£32 ,000 to£40 ,000 a year. So this is entry level recruitment consultants. obviously you need to be good at talking to people talking to candidates building relationships with companies you know good communication skills but that could be a really interesting and varied job as well another interesting one we've got on the list is working for British gas so they've got a posting which is specifically for a female apprentice gas service and repair engineer they're basically obviously a male dominated field and they're specifically looking for women to uh to train up in being a gas fitter they do have a post for men as well before we start getting done for not being equal opportunities uh but they they really want to boost the number of women uh going into that job so you'd essentially become a heating engineer the starting salary for that uh 19 307 pounds uh but once you complete the training it can go up to £147 ,303.

48:52Helen Crane: So, you know, that's one of those jobs, I think, people always say, don't they, you know, do a practical job, earn a trade, and you can earn really well. I mean, for someone who's, you know, just come off training, earning nearly£50 ,000 a year, that's an incredible opportunity. Just to run through a couple of the other ones on the list, a trainee estate agent at Foxton's in Watford starting at£32 ,000 and Commission as well. Working as an officer with the British Transport Police£32 ,472. HMRC, Customer Service Advisor, just over£28 ,000. Working at Coca-Cola in merchandising£27 ,000 and Betfred, Engineering Apprentice, working on their website 27 ,000 pounds a year and then roles with the post office and with HSBC as well so you know there's jobs across all kinds of different industries of people with sort of different skills and and different interests I think it's really good to see personally I think that you know the outlook has sort of changed a bit since I was coming out of my A-levels 20-ish years ago the conversation was oh well like you've got good A-levels so why aren't you going to uni I think that has changed to an extent now I think more people, you know first of all there are more options for people and I think those options are more sort of held in higher esteem as they should be because there's no right or wrong going to uni or not going to uni it all depends on, you know, what you want to do and I think if I had any advice it would probably be as Lee said, listen to the people who've done the job and know what they're doing

50:36Georgie Frost: lee's tip of the week oh georgie i've got two tips of the week for you i've come in i've come in loaded up for you number one well done number one spot trends um if you were somebody two weeks ago uh that managed to get their hands on a couple of thousand eclipse glasses uh for less than a quid a pop and then you're selling for between five and ten pound a pop um you would have made a handsome little profit and we speak from experience here georgie because hella managed to get her hands on some Eclipse glasses at the start of the week before the frenzy managed to get them for$7.99 a pot from a news Asian who confirmed that he'd sold$5 ,000 that day so we don't know how his total sells but you can add up the cost of those would have been absolutely next to nothing and the markup huge so spot trends make some dough number two go and support your local football team this weekend if you can and the premier league season's still a whole week away go and see what your non-league team is up to you're going to have a good day out you'll help them out boost the coffers it's very inexpensive afternoon out and you'll go and watch a great football to boot um that's what i'll be doing this saturday anyway come on derby all right thank you

51:50Lee Boyce: very much lee thank you very much helen thank you for listening you can keep up to date with all the latest breaking money news just go to thisismoney.co.uk or you can download the app and if you have any comments or questions for the team anything you'd like them to look into or you can tell Lee about your trip down to the football this weekend Lee?

52:07Georgie Frost: You can email us at podcast at thisismoney.co.uk you can leave a comment in where this podcast lives on our website and you can also leave some comments on Spotify etc the rest and let us know what you think.

52:19Lee Boyce: And if you like our podcast why not rate us wherever you found us it helps other people find us too.