What comes next? Bulgarians might fill the gap of course and we can keep enlarging EU. Soon we might welcome Kazakhs or Tajiks from Northern Afghanistan.  Or we might even need to do our own menial jobs as well.

The government has spotted a likely contingent of workers in the form of the phalanx of workers on disability who supposedly cannot work (which include a large proportion of Glasgow’s workers).  They will now be retrained and returned to work. If the hotel receptionist looks at you a little strangely next time… now you know why

Lets not discuss the cost of the Olympics which is bound to grow beyond its already gargantuan 10 billion sterling and lets not quibble over the supposedly huge tourism benefits which I personally doubt. Sure it put Atlanta on the map back in 84 but wasn’t Atlanta alredy putting itself on the map by reinventing itself as a new style Southern town. In the case of London it is already an enormous tourism destination and is unlikely to grown any more. Look at other Olympics cities and you realise that they simply get left with a portfolio of oversized venues that nobody really wants to use.

The Fool have a come up with a list of depressing predictions about what the UK will look like in 2012 as far as personal finance is concerned that is enough to make anybody want to emigrate (by 2012 the imploding Spanish property market will have bottomed out so there might be a place to start)

1. The average house will be worth £13,000 less in 2012 than today
2.  Seven out of ten credit applications will be rejected
3. House Price to Earnings ratio will improve for the first time since 1995
4. Pensioners will be worse off in 2012 than in 1980
5. Households face an £8,000 shortfall in their family budget in 2012

So the good news is that P/E for housebuyers will have improved: the bad news for houseowners is that is because houses will have fallen in value over the next five years. Points 4 and 5 are certainly the most distressing in real terms since we are talking about the potential impact that inflation and the ravening jaws of government taxation will have on our purse!

Is this a worse case scenario? Quite probably not as some commentators are suggesting in hushed tones that the UK will stagnate for ten years as the reality of global shifts become more apparent to our economy. Notably the move from Europe to the East which is only just beginning to consume and where savings ratios are very high. If that trend continues then when recession does come we can expect our economy to sink further and faster than elsewhere.

But look at it from a psychological perspective instead: faced with the cornucopia of a supermarket consumers simply buy far too much with the result that the cost of shopping as a whole goes up. BOGOFs, special deals… you name it; the supermarkets tempt you to buy a little bit more of everything in bigger boxes and bags. Notionally you shop for the next few weeks but you can’t shop for fresh vegetables for the next few weeks so inevitably you are back in the aisles later in the week and so the cycle goes on of buying again when you dont really need it.

Does this argument stack up? Evidence from reports suggest the we throw away as much as 1/3 of all the food we buy, worth an estimated £8 billion per year and this figures is only for consumers and not business waste of food as well. We get it wrong in two ways: we buy too much so that it goes off in the fridge and we get our portions wrong, serving too much on the plate and then having to throw it away afterwards. The end result is 6.7 million tons of edible food disappearing to landfills and as it breaks down producing the equivalent of 20% of car use. In other words, if we got our shopping and serving right it would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 5 cars off the road.

More importantly it would save you money. However you can go a lot further than this by buying food with a plan and then buying better quality. Ironically buying cheap food does not necessarily save you money. Rather than buying chicken breasts, buy a whole chicken and then share over a number of meals. By the time you are finished with the carcass, it will be wrapped in newspaper and have provided you with sandwiches, risotto, soup and maybe a pie. It will also have provided all manner of fun in the kitchen and if you pour a glass of wine for you both, you will be chattering all the while and enjoying the social space of shared activity as well.

This is not a grumpy complaint about tescopoly but rather a celebration of “slow food” with a realisation that for every penny we save in a supermarket, we more than spend in waste and want not.

But there was a dip in bankruptcy petitions from debtors during the final quarter of the year, with just 11,703 people asking to go bankrupt in the three months, the lowest level since 2005 and 10 per cent down on the same period of 2006. At the same time the number of creditors who petitioned for people to be made bankrupt also fell during the final quarter of 2007 to 4,614, 11 per cent fewer than during the last three months of 2006 and at the level last seen in 2004.

Why did they drop? Here’s a theory. With banks being hammered by “subprime” maybe they decided to reduce the amount of bad debt on their books by calling it good debt! In other words they cut their customers some slack and gave them more time so that their own figures would look a little better. By not pursuing customers to bankruptcy they avoid the stigma of increasing their allowance for bad debt.

If this is the case then maybe we will see the figures rise again precipitately in 2008.

Anyway… is bankruptcy the statistic we should focus on? Nope more helpful is savings ratios which really demonstrate what people are doing with their money. As savings ratios go down we know that people are essentially borrowing from their future!

Proposals to integrate financial education into secondary schools sounds far too little - a question of violin playing while Rome burns. Furthermore it will have no impact upon the millions of adults who have this problem now. Free financial advice lines from the government might do a little, but are more likely to be used by people in crisis and not as the basis for fundamental design of people’s financial planning.

Perhaps a more radical solution might be to not allow financial companies to extend credit willy nilly to anybody who approaches them since it is abuse of credit that seems to cause the most problems. Once a consumer is on the credit mill just about everything else disappears out of sight such as pension planning and planning for the future.

At the heart of the problem is the nation’s addiction to satisfaction now whatever the cost and a belief that owning a house will solve any problem. Looking at the US housing market implode this year is a timely reminder that housing is not a financial services product and that a balanced portfolio is still the best solution to long term planning.

It’s scary how much debt people on average are getting themselves into and of course, debt levels vary widely across the UK. So here are a few easy tests to see how far down the debt path you really are:

1. Wages spent before the end of the month?

Learning not to spend more than you earn each month can take time especially if you have racked up several credit cards over the years. The first lesson is don’t spend more than what you earn. Don’t be tempted to always buy now, sometimes the best things are worth waiting (saving) for!

2. Using your Credit Card for Christmas?

So maybe this year is a good year to set a proper budget for each person you have to buy for. Don’t be tempted to go shopping without a list of people you have to buy for. There are also some great deals on 0% transfers so make sure you are taking advantage of them.

3. Paying your bills using credit cards

It’s quiet worrying how many people have paid their mortgage using a credit card. Your mortgage should be the first thing you pay each month, not the last. Its an extremely expensive way to pay for your home and also in many cases can be a slippery slope that’s difficult to get out of.

4. Repay more than the minimum

Paying the minimum repayment on your credit card could mean you pay your mortgage of before your credit card. It is a always a good idea to try and clear off your credit card each month.

5. No savings?

Live today, forget about tomorrow is not a good approach if you want to retire. One thing is for sure the cost of living will continue to rise. The sooner you start saving the bigger the benefit especially with compound and interest.

As various experts ponder on the long term future of buy to let and also question whether the sector contributes to the economy or simply pushes up house prices, for many owners they see themselves as entrepreneurs who with few tax incentives take properties cheaply and then invest to make them available for rental.

Certainly markets like Edinburgh in Scotland have offered great opportunities to buyers with a huge demand for properties from renters and a steadily increasing price. How much of that is students and how much immigration is a very interesting question that should play out over the next few years.

One things buy to let owners should remember. They are largely viewed as speculators and so should not expect much support from politicians who are likely to see them an easy target for taxation. The latest changes in capital gains are not aimed at them, but at the same time nobody is crying for them either. Seatbelts, gentlemen!

Debtbusting solution? Buy less, buy with more frequency, and buy more carefully.

A visit to the supermarket and a scan of the trolleys around you reveals an inordinate amount of poor quality food being bought and also in large quantities by the average household. If these same people were to eat less then bills would go down. It is not a question of requiring supermarkets to reduce prices as typically they squeeze farmers and suppliers rather than themselves; it is a matter of us the consumer eating and buying less. With the UK the most obese nation in Europe, that can only be a good thing.

Edinburgh, like London has a mind of its own as “buy to letters” pour in to buy quality and supposedly high rental incomes.

Round the corner from Windsor Street, a tenement has had some serious structural work required costing each owner £60,000. Takes a quite a housing market to cover that sort of expense!

This is the bread and butter of the housing market and suggests that moving house is going to be more difficult, that getting onto the housing market will be more difficult and taking equity out of houses will be much more expensive (actually the last is not a product of the argument, but let’s assume this is true.)

At the same time people with credit cards are finding unsecured loans more difficult to come by.

All grist to the mill for those who expect to see the housing market slump.