Sunday 1 February 2009

Update

Hmmmm....so what's new in the last month? Well the first wave of redundancies happen at work this week. Everyone in the affected areas got their "at risk" letters last week and now they are in the final stage this of liaising with HR about their package etc. A couple of weeks ago we had a corporate email though about an additional 800 redundancies. I think its highly unlikely that we won't be affected by this phase of redundancies though. The first phase was mostly shop floor workers which wasn't surprising really as the current orders had gone through the floor and that's all they work on. The engineers though work on products already in the field and also research and development of future products. In those departments the work is as relentless as ever. But we were told last week that even engineering are facing serious cuts despite the workload being so high already.

And we didn't get good news about the mortgage either. Because the house prices have dropped so much in the last 12 months our LTV (loan to value) is now up at over 90% which means nobody wants to give us a mortgage. And to make matters worse our mortgage company Northern Rock have written to us telling us they have no products to offer us and we will switch to their standard variable rate (SVR) as of May. So we are at the mercy of Northern Rock then until we can get our LTV back down which might take 4 years or more. So were just hoping NR don't put their rates up too high.