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Stories from the Celtic Tiger Years Mod Warning in OP PLEASE READ

chops018

Does anyone have any good (or bad) stories from the Celtic Tiger years?

You always hear phrases about how people partied etc., was there just a constant flow of credit available to people and people actually taking the money e.g. was there actually teachers on circa €30k a year buying a house and car and an apartment somewhere.

I was in school and college during these years, graduated into the recession, so I didn't really see what was fully going on at the time bar the fact everyone was working and had money. My dad was working on the buildings on great money and my mam was working away also, we were never stuck really money-wise, also rent seemed to be a lot cheaper back then and fuel and also my college fees were only around €800 a year along with wages being fairly similar to what they are now (from what I can remember anyway, will stand corrected if I am wrong)

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mikemac2

Super Quinn sold designer water. €45 a bottle .

https://www.google.lu/amp/s/amp.irishexaminer.com/ireland/consumers-splash-out-45-a-pop-on-designer-water-71091.html

I remembered that story and I see now it was August 2008 so mere weeks before the finance world went pop.

I think I remember a designer like John Rocha design a chopping board. It was a plain piece of wood tbh, not very impressive

JupiterKid

At get-togethers and parties, people (including some acquaintances) bragging about their buy to let properties and investments in places like Bulgaria. I was a bit of a Cassandra at the time, explaining to them just why it was a credit-fueled property bubble not supported by economic fundamentals and would ultimately end in a huge crash and in tears. I must have seemed like a bit of a party pooper to some. Some of them listened to me, but most didn’t or didn’t want to.

I did manage to persuade two good friends and a friend’s mother into not buying investment properties in Eastern Europe. During the crash, they thanked me.

In the housing estate I was living in in South Dublin at that same time, many of the neighbours getting new cars and replacing them as often as possible - usually these cars were leased.

Getting a letter from my bank telling me that I was pre-approved for a €75K loan for anything I wanted. It went straight into the bin.

John_Rambo

Amazing how many people claim they knew exactly what was going to happen during the boom and predicted what was going to happen. Particularly on the internet.

I come across them all the time now but never ever came across them during the boom.

They must be worth a fortune now.

corner of hells

A taxi driving cousin of mine bought three apartments in Ireland and two in Poland, cause his Polish girlfriend wanted property in Poland.
He has his late parents house in Crumlin as his home , all the apartments and the girlfriend are long gone.

Salvadoor

Colleague printing and signing his own exaggerated salary confirmation letters on company headed paper (Big 4 accountancy firm) so as to get a second mortgage for an apartment in the docklands.

The bank took it at face value when even a cursory look at his current account would show that his monthly salary didn't match the salary as per the letter.

El_Duderino 09

John_Rambo wrote: »

Amazing how many people claim they knew exactly what was going to happen during the boom and predicted what was going to happen. Particularly on the internet.

I come across them all the time now but never ever came across them during the boom.

They must be worth a fortune now.

Absolutely. And economists who said as much at the time were branded gobshytes. David McWilliams' name is still spoken with derision even though he was ultimately, broadly correct.

People didn't want to hear it back then and though he was an eegit and when he was found to be correct he was seen as a smug know-it-all.

That's just how people work.

JupiterKid

John_Rambo wrote: »

Amazing how many people claim they knew exactly what was going to happen during the boom and predicted what was going to happen. Particularly on the internet.

I come across them all the time now but never ever came across them during the boom.

They must be worth a fortune now.

That may well be, but there were actually quite a few people out there - economists and sociologists in particular, who did see a major crash coming in the heady years of the property/credit bubble (Morgan Kelly and David McWilliams for example) as they had analyzed previous property/asset price bubbles such as the UK and Japan property bubbles in the late 1980s.

There was an entire forum on the web at the time called The Property Pin. I was a regular visitor of that forum, and there were many very good posters there who called the bubble fro what it was.

The ESRI warned repeatedly of a property and construction sector bubble between 2003 and 2006, as did the OECD, the European Central Bank and the IMF. Plenty of people, myself included, did warn people of the madness and folly of it all but most chose not to listen.

What did Bertie Ahern tell naysayers at the time to do? Oh yes, go kill themselves... :rolleyes:

completedit

Yeah, it wouldn't take much to see that a crash was coming. Anyone who can see the big picture would have been able to see the wood from the trees. The crash was not just an Irish phenomenon, it was based off asymmetries in the Eurozone which economists in America had warned about in the 80's. It's more surprising to me that people didn't think it would all end in tears. Although didn't Ben Bernake say that we were in a period of perpetual economic growth and that recessions were a thing of the past so I suppose there was a collective head in the sand view on things too.

Muahahaha

mikemac2 wrote: »

Super Quinn sold designer water. €45 a bottle .

/

And Fergal Quinn himself sold his entire supermarket chain at the top of the market for 420 million, it was fantastic timing on his behalf. But then he handed over most of that sum to his children who promptly blew it on property anyway and lost big time in the crash.

corner of hells wrote: »

A taxi driving cousin of mine bought three apartments in Ireland and two in Poland, cause his Polish girlfriend wanted property in Poland.
He has his late parents house in Crumlin as his home , all the apartments and the girlfriend are long gone.

That reminds me of a taxi home circa 2006. When we got there the African driver turned around and handed me a Re-Max business card and said he was also an estate agent and if I ever wanted to buy a property give him a shout, now is a great time to buy, he gave me the full sales pitch. That was a bit of a shoe shine boy moment, as the parable goes when the shoe shine boy is giving you stock tips then you know a crash is on the way

seamie78

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote: »

Did the LC in 2003, did a couple of years in college, then worked in Centra for 2006 and so was on just over minimum wage for a year when most of my friends were coining it on building sites. Like a few previous posters, for those lads it was all weekends away, nice cars, out for pints and falling out of nightclubs 4 nights a week. I got a job in the Civil Service at the start of '07 and while it was a bit of a pay rise which I was delighted with (we're talking maybe 40 euro a week here), most of them would have laughed at what I was earning. It was literally a fraction.

2 or 3 years later and they're all saying what a lucky so and so I am in my big, permanent job.

swap centra for spar and you described my situation to a tee

2lazytogetup

John_Rambo wrote: »

Amazing how many people claim they knew exactly what was going to happen during the boom and predicted what was going to happen. Particularly on the internet.

I come across them all the time now but never ever came across them during the boom.

They must be worth a fortune now.

ah i think people knew the crash was going to come. we knew this soft landing was never going to happen. i remember a few months before the crash AIB sold and leased back their premises in Ballsbridge. they knew. i was going to buy in 2007 but held off. if the boom kept going prices would have kept going up and id be losing out by not buying. but we knew the crash was coming, maybe not as bad. a property crash happend in the uk in the 80s or 90s. so wasnt unheard of.

thesimpsons

When banks are throwing round money, giving 90% then 100% and even 110% mortgages, you just know things have to come crashing down.

Feisar

2lazytogetup wrote: »

ah i think people knew the crash was going to come. we knew this soft landing was never going to happen. i remember a few months before the crash AIB sold and leased back their premises in Ballsbridge. they knew. i was going to buy in 2007 but held off. if the boom kept going prices would have kept going up and id be losing out by not buying. but we knew the crash was coming, maybe not as bad. a property crash happend in the uk in the 80s or 90s. so wasnt unheard of.

D'ya remember that "soft landing" chat!

Muscles Schultz

Trigger Happy wrote: »

I remember that muppet. Complaining that the govenment were doing nothing for the likes of him.
He wanted to retire to bulgaria at 40 and live off his rental income from properties he bought off his credit card (and a bulgarian mortgage). Pure greed and stupidity.

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/from-buying-flats-in-bulgaria-on-a-credit-card-to-bankruptcy-1.1718389%3fmode=amp

valoren

One Late Late Show I remember was circa March/April 2007 with Pat Kenny interviewing Englishman, Mark Shipman. He was on the show plugging a book he wrote about Commodity trading, how it was undergoing an uptrend/bubble and if you buy his book you can see how you can profit by spread betting. His story was that he'd been involved with bond trading in the 80's, made great money as a fund manager and “retired” at 33. He spent his early retirement looking to start investing in "buy to let" in the UK. He was very much a trend follower investor and au fait with the bubble/bust nature of various markets. It was about 1994 and he was eager to invest in property but the banks, engaging in financial prudence, wouldn't lend him as much as he would have liked. The UK had just come out of recession and property was too risky. Think flats in Notting Hill asking £100k kind of thing. Through the 90's he accrued a property portfolio of flats he let out. He became a millionaire and private investor. Kenny then asked him how many houses did he currently own. He was a multi-millionaire so obviously he had a significant property portfolio as well? He replied, to Kenny's and the audiences surprise, that he actually only had one property. The home he and his family lived in. Kenny, with a mix of shock and gentle scorn pressed him as to why that was. To the nervous amusement of the audience, he said he'd sold all his property at a significant return over the past few years. He said the trigger, the "signal" that it was time to exit the trend was twofold. It was his Postman telling him about his own portfolio and bragging about how much it was worth and those very same banks who refused to lend to him in the mid-90's when property was dirt cheap were practically hounding him to “invest” with them. He said he immediately went about selling up as the market had become a bubble. It was merely a segment in an otherwise forgettable Late Late but there was a palpable sense of unease in the audience. Is he right? What about the Irish property market?

The idea of a multi-millionaire, who knew what he was talking about, who'd put his money where his mouth was advocating that UK property was in "sell/chips off the table" mode must have made anyone watching who was heavily invested in property a little nervous. Turned out to be a shrewd move on his behalf to sell up as the Northern Rock debacle happened the following September.

Muahahaha

I remember that Mark Shipman interview and there was audible gasps in the audience when he said he had sold all his property because he felt the market was going to crash. At the time it was one of the rare moments on TV that someone went against the prevailing narrative, in the same year we had Eddie Hobbs on the Late Late telling us that Cape Verde was the new hotspot for property. In the crash Cape Verde was one of the first routes that the airlines cut flights to so Eddie and his chums ended up with lots of holiday homes on islands off the coast of Senegal but they couldnt get a direct flight from Ireland to even go to them.

Lewis_Benson

clintondaly wrote: »

I found out what a Tracker Mortgage was and I still have it

Me too

dotsman

2lazytogetup wrote: »

we knew this soft landing was never going to happen. i remember a few months before the crash AIB sold and leased back their premises in Ballsbridge. they knew.

Actually, it was the complete opposite. AIB sold bankcentre, in 2 tranches (new bankcentre buildings as they were being built and, later, the old bankcentre buildings, for a total of circa 700 million. Not because they "saw it coming", but they wanted to raise capital to lend out. That 700 million they raised allowed them to lend out billions in extra loans in 07/08 and is one of the reasons why, despite not really competing for most of the boom years, they still ended up with a massive hangover. Basically, after being very conservative and losing market share, they went hell for leather between mid '06 and mid '08 and lost it all. They most definitely did not see it coming.

CrankyHaus

dotsman wrote: »

Actually, it was the complete opposite. AIB sold bankcentre, in 2 tranches (new bankcentre buildings as they were being built and, later, the old bankcentre buildings, for a total of circa 700 million. Not because they "saw it coming", but they wanted to raise capital to lend out. That 700 million they raised allowed them to lend out billions in extra loans in 07/08 and is one of the reasons why, despite not really competing for most of the boom years, they still ended up with a massive hangover. Basically, after being very conservative and losing market share, they went hell for leather between mid '06 and mid '08 and lost it all. They most definitely did not see it coming.

I think there was a point where the rational predictions were consistently proven wrong for so long that everyone scrambled in for the money. Of course the rational predictions weren't wrong, they just weren't proven right yet.

The film and book The Big Short have a similar moment around 2007 where the market goes up in response to clear signs that it should be going down.

Ipso

JupiterKid wrote: »

That may well be, but there were actually quite a few people out there - economists and sociologists in particular, who did see a major crash coming in the heady years of the property/credit bubble (Morgan Kelly and David McWilliams for example) as they had analyzed previous property/asset price bubbles such as the UK and Japan property bubbles in the late 1980s.

There was an entire forum on the web at the time called The Property Pin. I was a regular visitor of that forum, and there were many very good posters there who called the bubble fro what it was.

The ESRI warned repeatedly of a property and construction sector bubble between 2003 and 2006, as did the OECD, the European Central Bank and the IMF. Plenty of people, myself included, did warn people of the madness and folly of it all but most chose not to listen.

What did Bertie Ahern tell naysayers at the time to do? Oh yes, go kill themselves... :rolleyes:

Don’t forget that people actually bought into the idea that Ireland was the richest country in the world. Mass delusion, all fur coat and no knickers.

PTH2009

Plenty of marriages and families torn apart by money and randy business people

JimmyVik

I was very young and I worked in IT contracting for a particularly flamboyant company and they brought us all to an eastern european country for the weekend - more than once.
They hired hookers at a lap dancing club and expensed it to the company.
Even the two girls on our team were doing lines off lapdancers arses.
Then on the flight home we were handed our bonus cheques, which were 5 figures.
Even threw in gift vouchers for the wives at home too.

On another similar trip they hired a yought. Huge thing, for 10 of us, plus invited guests and hookers and coke too.

Free drink every Friday night for us all in the local pub too.

Those were the days. Needless to say the company went belly up in the dot com bust.
Never seen the like since. But a lot of my friends worked for companies at that time that did the same kind of stuff.
Some were lucky to get into some that ipo'd and made a fortune. One guy I know was with 3 different companies one after the other that went public that each paid him over 30K bonus when they did.

JimmyVik

mikemac2 wrote: »

Super Quinn sold designer water. €45 a bottle .

https://www.google.lu/amp/s/amp.irishexaminer.com/ireland/consumers-splash-out-45-a-pop-on-designer-water-71091.html

I remembered that story and I see now it was August 2008 so mere weeks before the finance world went pop.

I think I remember a designer like John Rocha design a chopping board. It was a plain piece of wood tbh, not very impressive

BTs sold oxygen bottles.

thomasdylan

I was in secondary school and at the start of college during most of it. Worked on sites during summers and would sometimes get a call offering a few hundred for a days or twos work and would take time off college to do it. Looking back I was definitely getting screwed on that wage compared to everyone else but any student would bite your hand off for it now.

Every summer was working 6 days, playing GAA matches and going out a few nights a week. You'd win a match and some fella would push a fifty into your hand after and say have a good night. Lots of cocaine floating around. A young guy locally died one Friday night after doing a heap of it and it didn't slow anyone down. And it wasn't just young guys either, it would be sweaty 50 year olds with kids in the nightclubs off their heads.

The other thing there seemed to be was loads of affairs. When the money ran out there were lots of relationship breakdowns. People stopped turning a blind eye.

JimmyVik

John_Rambo wrote: »

Amazing how many people claim they knew exactly what was going to happen during the boom and predicted what was going to happen. Particularly on the internet.

I come across them all the time now but never ever came across them during the boom.

They must be worth a fortune now.

They were all at woodstock

facehugger99

I remember reading the property section of one of the Sunday papers. They would have a 2-bed terraced house in some dingy area of Dublin for crazy money but under the article they have a "or for similar money.." feature.

One time, 'for similar money' you could have bought a chateau in the South of France with its own vineyard for the price of the 2-bed in Dublin.

I remember thinking 'there's definitely something not right about this'.

John_Rambo

facehugger99 wrote: »

I remember reading the property section of one of the Sunday papers. They would have a 2-bed terraced house in some dingy area of Dublin for crazy money but under the article they have a "or for similar money.." feature.

One time, 'for similar money' you could have bought a chateau in the South of France with its own vineyard for the price of the 2-bed in Dublin.

I remember thinking 'there's definitely something not right about this'.

Hate to break the news, but that's still the case. Always will be. City properties v rural properties is global too.

padd b1975

I remember flicking through the match programme before the 2004 All Ireland Final.

That shyster Michael Lynn had taken an add out to flog some foreign apartments with the help of two 'celebrities'.

They were none other than Rui Costa (famous Portuguese footballer so fair enough) and..... Eh...... Willie Joe Padden!

madmaggie

I had savings in EBS the time of the launch of the Eircom shares. Staff told me I was a fool not to invest. Kept my money on deposit.

hoodie6029

College made me miss most of it first hand. Plenty of fellas dropped out to work on sites. Getting loans to go on a J1 was pretty common.

The student's union bought a brand new Freelander, God knows how they justified it. The guys elected that year were bald faced thieves though

In 2006 one of my class mates bought a house on a 100% mortgage without a job because he would be letting the other 3 rooms back to students.

Back in the 90's when my brothers were in college, if you got the grant, that pay back your parent's for rent etc and a few bob for yourself to get through the year. 2005/6/7, the grants came in and it was the biggest shopping day in town and night out. College was empty for days after they were paid. Needless to say, I didn't qualify for the grant.

In 2003, maybe 4/5 people out of 200 in the year had a car. Come 2006 about a quarter of the class were driving to college and nobody could get parking :rolleyes:

My brother was a taxi driver during the mad years. If he worked nights and if he didn't earn more than €300 it was a bad night. He was paid €50 on top of the fare to wait outside a house for 15 mins while the lads who'd flagged him got changed to go to their Christmas party.

People paying €500,000 for a 1970's bungalow in Meath just to knock it and build a new house on the outline (no permission required) was pretty common.

A local farmer built up his farm over 40 years into a strong enterprise. Passed it to his son who promptly started carving it up for development even though it was miles from anywhere. The son lost the lot in the crash and the parent's farm that they still live right next to is owned by a stranger and they can't go near it and have a crappy estate further down the road to boot.

Dublin Business School used to offer a Property Development Diploma back then. Not construction studies or construction economics just a diploma in how to flip land and houses essentially

As for the 'I know a fella who saved everything and didn't get burnt' stories, I've yet to meet one in real life. Undoubtedly some people did this but a lot of them were probably rich to start with or the type that wouldn't tell you they'd done well. I know I wouldn't be telling people how smart I was to not get burnt, pride before a fall and all that.