09:27
Especially with industry, I see it too – articles fly by about electricity-intensive industry, agriculture, and cultivation that can no longer make a profit and are cutting back on production.
I can understand that electricity-intensive industry cannot raise the price because the Chinese copy, which is cheaper and no one buys, becomes attractive if it costs 30% of the Swedish one.
The domino effect of shutting down six nuclear reactors, I believe, will be enormous.
When that market share is lost and the company in question no longer has its sales chain active, then it’s over. Customers develop new sales-purchase relationships that work just as well.
09:48
Since I have worked a lot on projects, we have maybe 3-4 times had a period where one finished a big project and doesn’t know where to go next. Then we have gone home to the house in Svedala and started up here and then had the goal of eating up as little as possible of the savings before the next job comes. It has been 6 months at the longest, I think, but as long as it is uncertain, you save a little extra.
One of the most obvious waste-save cycles is the big grocery shopping trips. When the cash is flowing in, you run around filling the biggest cart with everything fun, and if you forgot something, you buy it later at the small Hemköp at a rip-off price. Then you conjure up fun dinners with all the exciting things you bought, and if the dinner isn’t very exciting, you open a can of that exotic fun stuff you always have on hand to deliver a taste sensation.
The saving period – then you go with your stingy list where sausage stroganoff, thick pancakes, and blood pudding have sneaked in, scrutinize the prices, and make it an art form to deliver a successful Friday cozy evening as cheaply as possible – “God, that was good and it only cost, and Johan feels like a winner…”.
With all the uncertainty ahead, we have actually started moving towards the thick pancake period without it really being necessary, it is a feeling that everything is going towards worse times. It is the electricity prices that are haunting – you take an electricity price of say (5-6 SEK + surcharge) x (0.6 x annual consumption) and think it looks pretty unpleasant and take into account that running expenses must be covered by monthly income.
09:54
The oracle – in Stockholm, it is the plot of land you are really paying for. If a plot is ever sold, the price for it is sky-high.
Then you absolutely have price differences between different types of houses, the 70s houses with crawl spaces are far from as popular as the single-family houses from the 40s.
We always wanted a house in brick/concrete for the simple reason that with milder winters and a wetter climate, wood houses rot and mold quite a lot. We had to wash our wooden house before selling to get rid of some mold here and there.
You can probably get a dividing line between houses built in brick, which no one liked before because the wooden houses breathed better and were better against the cold, to them becoming more attractive now that the wooden houses are rotting away.
09:12
The biggest problem is that when you can no longer pay the electricity price and the interest rates and have to sell, then there are no bids at all on your house, zero.
And as long as you own your house, you have to pay unless you want to go bankrupt personally and end up with an unsecured loan for life.
-this is of course the worst-case scenario but the risk exists when the swings become too fast that solvent families get caught up in the momentum.
For example, a soaring electricity price this winter and the RB makes a huge increase again?
Then maybe one partner gets sick, you just had a child, or there is a layoff at work.