Buy a boat, not a holiday home

One of the most striking features of the second Covid summer has been the soaring prices of holiday cottages. How dare the owners of static homes in the vicinity of the coast be charging quite so much for the uneven pleasures of a week in a caravan park?

Well, get used to it because as Britain’s population continues to soar – we’re on track to hit 75 million in the next two decades –pressure on property and prices is only going to increase. As Mark Twain remarked: ‘Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.’

All right, you say, we’ll go abroad instead, plus the weather’s better over there.

Well good luck with that, too. As we approach a world of 11 billion people in 2050, don’t forget that potentially north of five billion of them will be defined as middle class – with the spending power to match. In other words, that idyllic pad in Tuscany that you’ve been returning to year after year might soon experience the sort of price inflation that we’ve seen here this summer.