This is a large part of the justification we went through. No point having cash sat in the bank these days.

No, buy another Morgan... probably a better return and a lot more fun than reading a bank statement.

Thank you gentlemen for the reasoning which I fully understand and agree money in the bank is not worth anything, on that reasoning I am in the process of buying another mountain cabin with land. Land prices up here increased by 10% LY, the family selling the cabin and land don't seem to have realized that so it's a very tempting bargain.

Did that too.

Good plan. As Mark Twain said: "Buy land, they're not making it any more". We have about 5 acres around the house and some years ago bought another 17 acres about 5 miles away. Good investment.

Yes watching the interest rates falling away we decided another property to long term let down here was the way to go instead of watching the bankers getting fatter on some of our surplus.
This has proved to be good timing with the advent of the latest SARS now that a lot of people are looking to move away from major conurbations.

My prediction is that property that has the following 7 features will be in high demand, post COVID.

1 Within 90 min of a major business hub
2. Within 90 min of the coast and/or open country
3 With fast ( at least 32mbs) broadband
4. With 4G mobile phone connectivity
5. With good local services
6. With good local state and private schools
7 With good local culture, theatre, music, etc.

Salisbury hits all the spots.

We live on an unadopted road going nowhere, less than 5 miles from the city centre. The house cost us £265,000 in 1999.
We are advised that the market price today is north of £900,000. I view this as complete madness.
Three doors up is a 1970s 2 bed bungalow on a large plot. It is on the market at £425,000: it will be snapped up, demolished and a new 4/5 bed house put on the plot that will hit £1m.

It happens around here, known as 'Bungalow bashing'

Gloucestershire too. What amazes me is that people seem quite happy to fork out what to me seems like astronomical prices for the resulting houses, 5 bedroom/double garage type jobs but on tiny little quarter-acre plots. We prefer to keep a decent distance from the neighbours, which is why we have a tatty old pile in a large plot of land.

Note that if you are on mains gas today, then the cost of heating water with gas (eg Octopus at 2.92p per KWh) will be less than what some (eg Octopus at 5.5p per Kwh) will pay you for surplus electricity. Of course if you are not on mains gas or cant get a decent export price for your solar then the solar diverter might make sense.

Likewise the economics of batteries is a bit tricky - they dont seem to have reduced in price in line with battery technology used in cars for example. Plus the electric cars with the ability to act as a domestic battery are now just coming out. Although if you did want to do that, I think the "Tesla deal" (also by Octopus) with the same price for export and import is interesting... with the small caveat of needing one of their batteries!