Betty Buyside: No share options, no house

Limited progress to report on two fronts, I'm afraid.

Despite my satisfactory job appraisal, nothing has yet been said about how many shares I might be offered when they finally get round to implementing a share incentive scheme here. This is supposed to be the foundation of my next house purchase and I am anxious to see how I might fare.

Of course the reason why Anthony Academic and I need to buy another house is that I confidently expect we will need to put a roof over the head of four people rather than two before long.

No, we are not expecting twins - but we will need a nanny almost as soon as we produce a baby.

When we got married, Anthony Academic had a rather poky one bedroom flat in Belsize Park, while I had a very nice two-bedroom pad in Notting Hill, and rented out the spare room to keep the mortgage down.

He was spending four nights out of five with me anyway, so it made sense to get rid of the lodger, rent out his flat instead and have him move in with me. Now we are trying to sell both properties so that we can buy a bijou cottage in Brook Green - the north part, so that I can still walk to the Central line.

It will of course be a shock to have to commute in from zone two rather than zone one, but the preposterous bonuses paid to the sellside and M&A people over the last decade have pushed up the prices of zone one property beyond that affordable by a humble buyside analyst.

With the consolidation in the financial services sector, I am growing especially anxious that we will be acquired by someone else, and I will lose my job and have nothing to show for it apart from a statutory redundancy cheque.

One week's pay for every year here won't go far towards that cottage in Brook Green.

And I am getting increasingly concerned that when my firm finally does sort out a share option scheme, it won't have the sense to make it tax efficient.

There would be no excuse for that. I can't pick up a paper these days without reading something about the various share schemes that are in place in the Square Mile - everywhere but here, it seems.

At least the options, when they arrive, look set to be priced in a lowly fashion thanks to the continued crapped out state of the stock market. Oh for the days of the FTSE at nearly 7,000! (The record close, you may recall, was 6,930.2 on the last trading day of 1999).

It was certainly much easier to be a buyside analyst in a bull market. I used to feel sorry for all those people whose options had been priced in 1999 and 2000, all vesting now and completely out of the money. But now I see Deutsche bank trying to reprice their options I have cut back on the sympathy.

I wonder if our share options will fall within the Enterprise Management Initiative? It would be nice to pay 10% tax for a change.

The real killer at the moment is FRS 17, just getting going but inevitably likely to affect my job. Now that all occupational pension shortfalls have to be reported on the balance sheet, pension fund trustees are likely to take an even more short term approach than they did before.

Perhaps I should move across to become a fixed income analyst on the buyside (possibly marginally less boring than a credit analyst). Or maybe I should just sit tight and wait to claim that maternity leave..........

But it doesn't look like we shall be needing the spare room anytime soon. Despite massive efforts on my part (purchase of ovulation kit etc) conception has still not occurred.

One good thing about having an academic for a husband is that even though he is not very good at physical activity pre-7am, he can at least nip home at lunchtime when required.

You can contact Betty at: bettybuyside@efinancialcareers.com