Foreign Perspectives

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Although it’s best to retain your endowment for the full term sometimes that’s just not possible for one reason or another.

However, you don’t need to take the pitifully low amount that you’ll be offered by the insurance company as it’s possible to sell endowments these days and almost always that’ll bring you in a significantly larger amount than the insurance company are offering you. If it’s an endownment that you’ve notionally been using to pay off your mortgage the amounts involved can be very substantial indeed (you usually can’t sell the endowment if it’s been assigned to the bank).

Popularity: 11% [?]

You might think that this is a daft time to be thinking about getting yourself some education in the fields of stock market investment and property investment with both those worlds seeming to be in the process of falling down around us.

In fact, it’s close to being the perfect time to have yourself fully equipped with the knowledge that you need to make the most of these times and to take advantage of the upturn that can’t be far off now. WIN investing is one of the top outfits offering training in both these areas.

Their courses aren’t cheap but are very high quality (eg one of the masterclasses lets you keep the laptop you’ll be using during the course).

Popularity: 15% [?]

Although you might think that it would be difficult to get a famous name to speak for you at some event in fact it’s usually fairly easy as a considerable number of them are signed up with various talent agencies.

The range of those potentially available to you is staggering these days. Obviously you’ll need to pay serious cash for the really big names in the after dinner speakers market but there are hoards of less famous speakers who are equally great speakers in their fields and you may find that some of the ”lesser” speakers specialise in just the type of topics that you’re looking for anyway so it’s very much worthwhile to leaf through the listings.

If you are looking through for an affordable after dinner speaker for your event, unless your budget is substantial, you’ll find it useful to be creative in your selection and to consider a range of speakers who might be suitable. Many of these speakers are extremely flexible in what they can speak about for you so, for example, if you were to choose a famous climber you don’t need to assume that he’ll just speak about climbing as he will almost certainly be able to relate his experiences of climbing to the event which you’d like him to speak at.

Perhaps the extreme of flexibility is the likes of Rory Bremner who can weigh in with a range of voices in addition to a range of topics.

Popularity: 10% [?]