Foreign Perspectives » Miscellaneous

Are we really at the end of the summer?

Arnold — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:21:22 +0000

This summer has just flown in. Way back in June we had all kinds of plans for July and August in loads of different areas of our lives and yet we find ourselves at the end of the summer with hardly any of the things completed.

Following the fiasco of last summer we decided to be more proactive in ensuring that James didn’t fall backwards quite so much in his reading so we collected two separate collections from his teachers and planned to run right through with those plus Kumon. What we’d not allowed for was that the summer holiday activities were at least as tiring as school-time ones were so we just about managed to get through the Kumon and didn’t manage to even open the other two.

We’d also planned on getting away on one or two long-ish holiday trips but haven’t, yet, managed even one.

And now we find ourselves wondering if it’s time to buy some rain boots for the winter!

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Fighting back ageing

Arnold — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:11:25 +0000

With the demographics of most of the western world lurching towards an older population there’s a rapidly rising interesting in means of fighting off the signs of ageing just about everywhere.

Predictably this includes assorted cosmetic preparations notably in the line of eye cream which, in most cases, is basically just filling in the cracks rather than doing something about them. Less obvious is an interest in continuing education which, on the whole, tends to attract older than average people.

Oddly it can also lead to an increase in availability of things like gyms which can have a surprisingly elderly clientele at times.

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Will it ever be economic to print your own photographs?

Arnold — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:03:08 +0000

With the advent of dedicated photo printers you’d think that full color printing was finally with us. But, of course, it isn’t really.

The problem is a combination of the cost of the inks and of maintaining the various print elements within the printer. Add those two together and you’ve a whole lot of cost and effort involved to produce the quality of prints that you can get quite easily from online printers these days.

Speed isn’t really an issue as delivery is pretty fast these days so unless you really need the prints in your hand today you probably don’t really need that fancy photo printer.

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Online schools

Arnold — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:57:49 +0000

One thing that you don’t see too much of are Online Schools or at least those of the children type schools as, of course, there are untold numbers of management schools around.

For a whole bunch of reasons we’d be quite interested were there to be a truly workable online school but, so far, their remit seems to be confined to university level schools. Quite why that is, is presumably down to the relatively low numbers of parents who go in for home schooling as one assumes that they’d be amongst the first group to give online schooling a go for their children.

Oh well, perhaps one day such a thing will turn up.

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Where should the upticks in employment be?

Arnold — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:53:05 +0000

Ordinarily, construction jobs would be amongst those doing fairly well in a recession as whilst people may not be moving house quite so often, they will tend to improve and extend what they already have. However, as ever, this time it’s different.

Those house improvements aren’t happening because people don’t have the cash to do it. Cash is exactly what they need too as the builders can’t get credit from their suppliers so the whole system has made a sudden lurch from credit based to cash based which is painful for everyone.

Other signs up improvement would be in the computer field as websites and whatnot would tend to need created as the economy improves. That too seems a little flakey this time around.

Of course, all this assumes that the economy will experience an upturn and, no doubt, it will. The big question is: when?

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How much track do you keep of your forex risk?

Arnold — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 12:38:11 +0000

If they’re honest, most people would say “not much” whether it be for their holiday spending or for their business dealings.

The practical reason for that in most cases is that Forex margin management is something that can be quite a complex subject to get your head around but these days currencies are moving around so much that it’s becoming essential for many businesses. Although in normal times exchange rates are fairly stable, we’ve not been in “normal times” for a while now and we’ve seen the British pound going from almost $2 to $1.40 over the last couple of years.

Such wide variations in exchange rates generally lead to wider foreign exchange margins too which means that it’s more important than ever to at least get the margin you’re charged down and try to get some control of the exchange rate itself through the various forex products available these days.

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Is it the right time to invest in gold?

Arnold — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:47:54 +0000

If you’d asked that question a year ago I’d have said that it’s too high now but it’s gone up around 30% since then. Five years ago and I’d have said the same but it’s more than doubled since then.

Of course, as with all investments, there is no truly right time to invest or at least not one that you’ll know about in advance. That said, there’s never a wrong time to begin a Gold investment programme if you approach it as an investment programme rather than a one time hit as some people do. The key thing is to stagger your investments just as you would in any other field of investment. That staggering has been something that’s historically been quite difficult to do in that in years gone by the investment unit tended to be a gold bar which obviously requires a serious commitment. However, all that has changed in recent years with the advent of smaller bars, safe storage facilities and wider availability of bullion coins. Thus you can almost treat it as any other phased investment these days, albeit with the smallest unit seemingly endlessly increasing in value, at least for now.

One thing to watch is that you don’t want to commit too high a chunk of your wealth to gold just as you shouldn’t commit too high a percentage to any asset class. Although gold prices have been on an upward path for quite some time now, that doesn’t mean that they’ll continue on that path forever. Sooner or later the prices will come down but by averaging your purchases over an extended period you should be in a good position to take advantage of the overall rise when that fall does arrive.

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Why is it so complicated to buy printer supplies?

Arnold — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:12:48 +0000

Printers have been around for a long time now and the technologies that are used by the current models have also been out quite a number of years so you’d think by now that there’d have been some kind of standardisation for printer cartridges, wouldn’t you?

Even the supermarkets don’t have enough shelf space to hold all the different cartridges these days and when you move to something even a little bit out of the ordinary like the xerox phaser 8560 you’re asking for trouble in trying to track down the supplies for it. We’ve even found that the computer shop which sold us our latest printer last Christmas doesn’t stock the cartridges for it which is a pain as we don’t use it an awful lot so don’t want hit with the postage charges for ordering just a single cartridge online.

Maybe one day they’ll standardise…

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The phaser is sort-of here

Arnold — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:07:32 +0000

Isn’t it odd how futuristic stun guns have almost become part of our everyday lives in recent years?

Not so long ago these stun guns were exclusively part of the science fiction landscape yet now you can pick up one for under $30 and they’re commonly employed by police forces as part of their non-lethal arsenal. Whilst you’d hope that few people would need to use one sadly in some areas of our cities you just can’t rely on “someone else” to protect you and in that respect it’s nice to see that they are now affordable enough to let people regain that confidence in their personal safety that we all used to have.

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Realistically priced holidays for those with families

Arnold — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:57:47 +0000

When you’ve got a family it doesn’t take long for the price of couple-type holidays to get completely out of hand by the time you multiply the airfares by four or five, throw in the multiple rooms required and that’s before you even think about organising something that most of you will like most of the time. That’s where european holiday parks look very appealing.

The transport costs are considerably lower normally as you can just get in the car, over on the ferry and you’re there. In most cases you can do the door to door transport in much the same time as you’d be talking about with flights by the time you add in the couple of hours prior to the flight and all the messing about getting to and from the airport. Moreover you don’t have any of the hassles entailed in avoiding the excess baggage charges and, of course, you have your own car so you don’t need to budget for renting one.

The accommodation costs are massively less as you don’t have the multi-room problem (why can’t hotels allow for larger families?) and the food costs are a whole lot more controllable if you aren’t tied to hotel/restaurants all the time. In some cases you can get a weeks accommodation at one of the parks for less than you’d get a nights accommodation for a family in a hotel and that’s not requiring you to go downmarket to make savings like that either.

Once you’re there you’ll find activities laid on to suit just about everyone at every age and, of course, there’s the option to explore the local countryside too.

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