If you haven't woken up to the fact that your home is not an investment, then it would be worth, to coin a phrase from Officer Barbrady in South Park, "getting right on that with thinking". It is easy to underestimate the impact of seeing the world in the way you want to see it rather than the way it actually is. It is much easier to see the folly of others because we are distant from it than to see our own folly.

Let me give you some numbers, which are personal. I bought my home about 15 years ago for £71k and sold it last year for about £240k. I didn't sell it at the top of the market, at the top apparently it was valued at £280, so lets work with that latter figure. That means that my house went up by 400% in the space of about 14 years. As a side note, my mortgage when I sold the place was £230k, the rest I took out and 'invested',.... long story but it blew up!

Anyway...... I lived in a bubble of increasing house prices and assumed things were going to sail along as they always had, and that is what a large number of people have also done. So, if things had carried on in my illusory 'bubble world', by 2025 my house would be work nearly £1million! Woo hoo! Now this is a house which is not in a great area and where the majority of people earn less than the average wage I would guess (which in the UK is about £25k). So my average house, in my average town would be 40 times average salary. Ok..... stick with me here..... wages go up over time (always good to get those end of year pay rises), so to keep pace, average salaries would have to be in the region of £330k. These are ball park figures and not meant to be down to the penny, all I am trying to do is to give you a feel for what is going on.

So, while you sit there and hope that your house is going to go up in value, think that in order for it to do so UK average salaries need to go up by about £300k over the next 15 years in order to pay for it. The reality of course it that wage settlements are down and not up, so the chances of your earnings going to that level are a big fat zero. So despite the blip in house prices at the moment if you are sitting there hoping the party is going to get started again you are going to have sit....... and sit...... and sit....... (well you get the picture). It is not going to happen so get your head around that fact and plan for a future that is going to be very different than the one you imagined.

Time to press send........