Foreign Perspectives

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The Egg Money card used to be one of the handiest cards that I had, despite the dopey hamster adverts.

You could use it as a savings account as it paid 4% (up until a few months ago) when you’d overpaid and indeed they encouraged you to do this. The original plan behind the card was that you’d use it essentially as a current account and therefore the credit limit was really an overdraft limit. Not only that but they paid 1% cash back on everything that you bought and even more if you bought from a small range of shops. Finally, because it was intended as a current account replacement, you could withdraw cash at no charge.

However, this year Citibank killed all that stone dead.

The 1% rebate remains, but now there’s no interest paid if you’re in credit, the limits remain pitifully small and it’s now 3% to lift cash. So it’s become an also-ran credit card. Sad to see such an innovative product killed but it’s worse that that as the security methods of Citibank are used too. Thus if you try to spend more than £200 or so in a single transaction the shop needs to call up for an authorisation number and if you use it more than twice in a single shop in a day then it’s blocked.

Unfortunately, it looks like I’m going to have to abandon this card as I had to with a previous Citibank card basically because of Tesco… today’s petrol, then the thank you card for James’ teacher, then the groceries mean it’s blocked, again.

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By the time you read this, we should be well on the way to our place in France (scheduled posts are wonderful!) and pretty much totally exhausted.

The plan is that on Saturday morning we’ll have gone from Belfast to Rosslare to catch the LD Lines ferry to Le Havre around 5pm. That’s a relatively easy 4 hours drive though it seems to go on forever as we found out doing the route the other way in January.

It’s an overnight ferry trip which is quite relaxing in comparison to the drive from Stranraer to Dover. Cheaper too when you offset the cost of the cabin against the savings in petrol. Unfortunately, that 5pm-ish departure makes for an arrival around the same time the next day in Le Havre.

Our theory is that we’ll relax on the boat and start driving when we get off. Snag is that at this time of year most of the hotels along our route down France will be full so we probably won’t have any choice but to drive on through the night which isn’t altogether appealing to put it mildly.

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As always with government sponsored savings there’s a mix of an intention to address the savings plans to just about everyone and the ensuing complications that this makes which makes it that much more difficult to get over the ideas to such a diverse group of people.

Fortunately, the kiwisaver product has attracted the interest of those aiming to clear a way through all the jargon and identify the particular product that meets your needs. For example, the Kiwiselect asks a few basic questions (your age, your attitude to risk and your expectations as to how an investment should perform) before going on to identify investment funds that are aiming to meet those particular needs. I say aiming as none of the returns are guaranteed.

It’s a simple product selector which cuts the number of funds worth looking at to a manageable number (six came up in my case) and more importantly weeds out all those that wouldn’t fit with your investment personality.

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