Don't sign away your freedom for a purple Audi

With house prices falling and repossessions rising, most rational people would think that now is a pretty bad time to be in negative equity. Yet Abbey's marketing a product that encourages you to do just that...

With Hometrack reporting that average house prices fell for the first time in two years in October and the Council of Mortgage Lenders forecasting that repossessions could rise by 50% in 2008 most rational people wouldn't, I don't think, feel that now is a particularly good time to be in negative equity.

Not so the mortgage sales teams at Abbey. No, they are still happily flogging their "100% plus" mortgage. This lets you borrow the full purchase price of the house or flat you want and for good measure another £25,000 on top of that.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.