Cheryl Macleod - ne Eames

18/09/2026

We didn't need a deposit to buy our first home - here's why
Until last year, Conroy, 32, and his partner Amber, 28, saw little prospect of owning their own home.
They were renting in central Manchester where they work and could not afford to save up for a deposit.
Then they came across a relatively niche, and some experts say riskier, type of mortgage that offered a solution.
The Track Record mortgage from Skipton Building Society covers 100% of the value of a property, with the borrower paying nothing upfront.
Borrowers must meet strict eligibility checks and pay a higher interest rate - in Conroy and Amber's case 5.33% fixed for five years - but they were happy to do this. And in August they bought a four-bed home for £242,000 in Swinton on the edge of Manchester.
"I don't think it's dawned on us it's really ours," says Conroy, a video editor.
The return of low-deposit deals
According to the Bank of England, the share of UK mortgages with deposits worth less than 10% of the property's value is currently the highest it has been since 2008 when such loans were widely available.
The average deposit for first-time is 20%.

It comes as lenders such as Lloyds, Santander, Skipton and Yorkshire Building Society have launched a raft of new mortgage deals over the last few years covering upwards of 95% of the value of a property, and in some cases as much as 100%.
They say they want to help first-time buyers get on the housing ladder as property prices continue to rise and while saving for a deposit remains a struggle.
But these loans tend to charge higher rates, aren't available for all types of property or borrower, and come with risks customers should be aware of.

If you would like to discuss options in this area, please contact us.

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17/06/2026

11/06/2026

27/05/2026

Your pension is primed to let you down at the worst possible time
Some of the most popular workplace funds aren’t even keeping pace with inflation
May 26 2026, The Times
If you are approaching retirement you probably have a pension you have forgotten about, or maybe two. Possibly even three. Each one in a different workplace scheme, chosen by a former employer through a negotiation you were never part of, invested in a default fund you have never looked at, earning returns you have never compared with anything.
The system was clearly not designed to help you find out about, or monitor performance. If it had been there is no way the dreadful figures on pension performance in the five years to retirement would have been allowed to stand.
The analyst CAPAdata tracks the performance of UK workplace pension default funds and its figures show what has been happening to workers’ pension returns in the five critical years before they retire, known as pre-retirement. This is when the stakes are highest and there is little time to recover from a bad decision.
• How 49 people control £168bn of our workplace pensions
They should alarm anyone who has a pension in this country.
The best performing pre-retirement fund in the dataset over the five years to March 2026 was the SEI Flexi Default, growing at a compound annual rate of 9.5 per cent — impressive. The worst was Scottish Widows, at a miserable 3.6 per cent a year, a rate that did not even keep pace with inflation.
Many of the names that you are likely to recognise are clustered at the bottom. The Legal & General Target Date fund, one of the most widely used defaults in the country, averaged 3.6 per cent a year. People’s Pension, covering millions of lower and middle-income workers through auto-enrolment, averaged 3.8 per cent. Royal London averaged 4.6 per cent.
The industry average five-year return was 5.5 per cent a year and every one of those household names was below it. These are the funds millions of British workers were placed into, without their meaningful input and without anyone being required to tell them how their fund stacked up against the alternatives. Oh, and those figures are all before charges. Which makes them worse.
Consider what was happening to prices and investment markets globally during those same five years. UK cumulative inflation ran at about 30 per cent, or about 4.85 per cent a year, one of the most punishing inflationary periods since the 1990s.
Meanwhile comparable UK investment funds were delivering far stronger returns. The opportunity was there within the mainstream UK investment universe, why did it pass so many savers by?
It does not require your employer to explain why they chose it. The Pension Schemes Bill will introduce a value-for-money framework requiring funds to publish comparable performance data, but it is not expected to be fully operational until 2028.

23/05/2026

Interesting reading for renters with no income evidence trying to get on housing ladder. Other lenders are available.

Andrew and Justine Boniface had to rent after moving back to the UK from Spain. They were desperate to buy, but couldn't get approved for a mortgage