Leaving For A Nice Semi in Costa Rica
By LAUREN BOOTH, Daily Mail

Tomorrow, a family friend is leaving the UK to 'make a new start' abroad. Packing boxes at her rented flat in Liverpool, she told me her plans. 'Well, we'll go to Costa Rica first. Then maybe on to Canada.'

'Costa Rica?' I asked. 'Why Costa Rica?' She replied: 'Well, I don't have any pension and I can't afford to buy anywhere decent round here. But I've looked on the net and you can still get a nice property over there that's really cheap.'

Catching my worried look she added: 'And it's pretty stable for Central America.'

She and her bright teenage daughter are leaving friends and family behind not necessarily because they have found a better place than England in which to live.

They are going because of the cost of buying a home in Lancashire.

Meanwhile, UK mortgage debt has just topped the trillion-pound mark.

The banks are pretty chipper at the fact that two-thirds of us are willing to pay around £800 a month until 2020 (most of it in interest) for the right to say we 'own' a house.

Which, of course, we don't.

It's psychologically convenient for us to forget that pesky small print - the bit reminding us that our 'homes' can be taken by the bank until we've made all 168 monthly payments.

Even the Bank of England's Governor, Mervyn King, is getting nervous.

He's told MPs on the Treasury Committee that home loans are now equal to the UK's entire economic output.

He's not sure, he says, how sustainable 'all this is'.

Well let's see. The second quarter of last year showed a 61 per cent leap in repossessions.

In the same period, 67,580 people went bankrupt, another shocking rise on the previous year. Despite low interest rates, households are feeling the strain. None of this sounds especially 'sustainable'.

So, why did most of us borrow at least £100,000 more than we ever should?

The answer is snobbery. In the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher famously said 'any man who rides a bus to work after the age of 26 can count himself a failure in life'.

Trendy

These days, catching the bus has become faintly trendy.

City dwellers, even those with cash, will (sometimes) hop aboard just so they can feel they're 'doing something for the environment'.

Now the mortgage, not the car, is the social barometer we rely upon.

People older than 26 who do not have one are few and far between these days.

There seem to be only three types of adult who haven't already taken out a loan of at least £150,000.

They are the underclass who can't get credit, the traveller who can't stay in one place and the young couple who can't afford a kennel in the Outer Hebrides.

For most of us, it's worth paying 42 per cent of our annual salaries just so our colleagues don't secretly look at us with pity for having to pay rent.

The 'renter' is looked upon in the same condescending light as the Big Issue seller in the part of North London I'm from.

In Hampstead, renting is strictly for students and alcoholics.

No woman I know would dream of dating a man who doesn't own (at least) one property by the age of 30. Horrible, petty, but true.

Individually, we like to boast about the cost of our home ('mine's just gone up to half a million').

Or we increase our loans by remortgaging to make them that bit better than our neighbours.

Even the strain of the repayments can provide the stressed executive with extra kudos at a dinner party.

Recently a designer I sat next to sighed that he was 'paying almost as much as the Blairs every month' for his.

Everyone around the table knew that what he was really saying was: 'I'm loaded, with a house far bigger than I need. But should Silvio Berlusconi ever drop by he'll be impressed with the marble hallway.'

Some say that my friend is mad to jump on a plane in her mid-50s with her 16-year-old daughter in tow and head off to a Latin-American country where she knows absolutely nobody.

She's not mad really.

She's part of a migrational trend our politicians and banks are turning a blind eye to. The equivalent of a 21st Century brain drain.

The UK's mortgage refugees are leaving by the BA planeload.

Guatemala anyone?