Supposedly buying things online is the future of retail. As this funny video goes, there is still a long way to go.
Are you unsure whether to put your extra cash into savings and investments or use it to pay off your mortgage? Here are some of the pros and cons of each option.
If you have found yourself with a bit of extra cash to play with you might be faced with a dilemma: should you invest it in a savings account or investment strategy, or should you use it to pay off your home mortgage quicker? Both of these options are beneficial for different reasons, but which one will make the most out of your money?
Advantages of Paying off the Mortgage Earlier
If you can manage to prepay your mortgage, you will end up saving quite a large amount of money in interest payments. This money that you have saved is guaranteed and risk-free. Gains that you have acquired from investments will be subject to taxation, which means that you will not receive their full value. The money that you save in paying off your home early will not be affected by any taxation.
To give an example of how much you can save by paying off your mortgage quicker, let’s imagine that you have a 30 year mortgage on a £250,000 house at 6% interest. Your monthly payments will be approximately £1,500. If you can afford to pay an extra £100 per month you will be able to pay off your mortgage 4.5 years earlier and save almost £52,000 in interest. If you were able to manage an extra £250 per month you could save £100,000 in interest over the lifetime of the loan and pay if off a full 9 years early.
By paying off your mortgage you also own your home and have no major debt obligations, which is a fantastic financial position to be in.
Advantages of Saving Instead
There is also a lot to be said about the financial advantages to putting your money into a regular savings account rather than paying off your mortgage. There are many places that you can put your money which will offer a much better return on investment, such as a workplace retirement plan that will offer 50% of your contribution.
Also, if you have any other debt such as credit card debt, it makes much more sense to pay that debt off first before paying down your mortgage. This is because mortgage rates usually have the best interest rates on debt and credit cards usually have the highest. You will lose more money by leaving that credit card debt to accrue interest as you pay off your mortgage.
There are some advantages to taking the full term to pay back your mortgage, and one of them is that inflation will work in your favor. If you have a 30 year mortgage, your £1,000 payment will only be worth around £350 in the final years.
Even though you might be prepaying a large chunk of your mortgage, your bank will still own your house until you have paid off the entire loan. If you find yourself struggling financially later on and you cannot make your payments, you will still risk losing your home. However, if you had invested that money instead you would have insurance against potential hardship.
Is paying off the mortgage as quickly as possible the best use of your money, or is it better to invest the difference and let it gather interest over the years? There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to each option, and the answer depends on your own personal financial situation.
Everybody wants to be safe and secure in their working lives as well as their private lives. But is this right guaranteed not just in law, but also recognised as a universal entitlement?
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Health and safety laws have been a part of the fabric of working life for decades, and represent an evolution in rights for employees that began with the establishment of Unions in most industrialised countries over a century ago and now protect workers, employers and customers alike from preventable injury. Such laws can often seem irritating when one is engaged in a busy project that could do without the added costs and time that get absorbed by the implementation of these laws; however, if an employee or customer has a serious accident at work the results can be extremely financially punishing and the emotional toll of guilt at knowing that one is directly responsible outweighs the troubles that are taken in fulfilling the obligations of the law.
However, beyond the scope of national laws the technical issue of whether health and safety is a de facto, concrete human right in the workplace is a more complex one. Article 23 and 25 of the UN charter of Human Rights respectively mention that all citizens of the world are entitled to have the right to conduct their lives (including, presumably, the way they earn their livelihood) in conditions that are humane and that everyone has the right to a standard of life suitable to one’s health and wellbeing. Having said this, the wording of the charter is rather poetic and vague and does not specifically mention health and safety in the working environment, and as a result one can say that the right is inferred by these statements but is not guaranteed unequivocally by them. Thus it is difficult to say that- having looked at the UN charter- from a strictly legal basis that health and safety in the workplace can or should be considered a human right.
A clever lawyer might argue that health and safety in the workplace are guaranteed under the laws of many countries but it may not be definitively a human right as such. It is likely that the average working person considers their labour to be a natural obligation to their community and nation, and would feel very unhappy about being told that despite dispatching their duties in society they have no universal, inalienable rights to workplace safety beyond the basic obligations under state or national law. Therefore, shouldn’t health and safety in a working environment be adopted by the appropriate authorities as a basic right for all?
There is a case to made indeed. However, those who live and work in the European Union do have health and safety guaranteed under the European Bill of Human Rights, article 31. Thus, if an employer does not provide for working conditions that respect the health or dignity of his or her employees or customers within the European Union then they have violated the EU human rights bill and are subject to prosecution in the European Court of Human Rights.
Therefore, it can be said with confidence that for those living within the European Union health and safety in the workplace is technically a human right and should be considered as such. Elsewhere in the world, the rights are upheld in other forms.
