If you’ve been hard working and fortunate enough to build up a reasonable amount of capital throughout your business life, you want to make sure the current upheaval doesn’t make you a victim by destroying all that you’ve responsibly built up.

In ordinary situations, Bank Shares, Bank Deposits and Real Estate are considered to be almost bullet proof homes for your hard earned money, however in the current crisis, if you have in excess of a few tens of thousands of pounds, you’ll want to split it across lots of banks in order to feel sure that your money is guaranteed in the event of a bank failing.

It’s nicely ironic that the current instability started by banks over enthusiastic involvement in the Home Buying market, and that this has caused the fall in property and Bank Share values, and the doubt about which Banks could suffer share price falls which push them under the required capitalisation limit for the loans and Deposits in their accounts. If that comes about, the bank can’t continue to operate and must either fail or be taken over by another bank or in the final resort be nationalised. If any of those things come about, the unlucky shareholders are not likely to get very much if any of their investment back, and depositors will have some guarantees, but only on the first few tens of thousands of poundsworth of deposits.

None of the above is much comfort to those of us who are at that phase in life where we can’t or simply just don’t want to have to begin again from nothing, so what can we do? We’re told that the Home Buying market is still on the downward slope, so prices will drop before they rise again, large bank deposits are no longer fortified by bullet proof guarantees, and Bank Shares are only OK if you know for sure that the bank in question sources the bulk of its money for lending from its own depositors rather than the money markets.

Here’s my suggestion for consideration: First of all make sure you have more than enough ready money to get you through anything the next 2 years can throw at you; then, why not use some of the remainder in becoming or investing in Home Buying either as Cash House Buyers or by investing in a Home Buying company that has in place a firm survival plan to carry it through the Downturn. If you take this latter course; all the usual caveats apply: do the due diligence, and make sure that the firm you are investing in will have more than enough wherewithal to fund it’s operations and financing commitments right up to when the market bottoms out and begins to climb again. Also be sure that your investment gives you enough control to make sure that the business is run sensibly and that survival is assured.

If this seems like foolishness, consider this; in the UK, just to keep the Market stable over the next ten years; three million new dwellings will be required. At the current rate of building, we’re not likely to see more than a third of those put up. This shows that the medium and long term prospects are very good for investing in property, because it’s much more probable that demand will outstrip supply than the reverse happening.

Cash House Buyers and Home Buying Companies normally buy houses at 80% of market valuation, because the vendors are more than happy merely to find somebody to “Sell my House”. This ensures that they have a sensible margin to cover all their own costs, and to allow enough spread to use discounts as incentives to turn over properties quickly, so cutting the risks of falling values lowering or wiping out margins. Also, in the fairly unlikely event of prices tumbling to a point where you can’t sell at a profit, you’ll be in a position to wait for the market to climb out of the trough.