Foreign Perspectives

Archive for July, 2008

There’s a solar eclipse coming up this Friday morning though I’ll not be at this one or at least not at totality basically because the path is crossing a whole bunch of places that are pretty difficult and/or expensive to get to.

At our last one in Turkey in 2006 the plan was for a group of those at that one to organise a trip to see this one in Novosibirsk in Siberia but it proved to be a touch too complex to organise both travel and accommodation to such a relatively isolated spot. The most viable way seemed to be by means of the Trans-Siberian Express but I suspect that the expense of that proved to be a touch high to swing it with the rest of the family for many people.

Still, at least we’ll see a partial eclipse on Friday morning. For most of Europe that’s between about 9.30am to 11am (8.30am to 10am in the UK/Ireland) when you’ll see the sun going dark for the couple of hours as the moon passes across it.

Don’t forget that you can’t look directly at the sun for more than a very short time with your eyes and not at all with binoculars, telescopes or similar. It’s OK to view it via the screen on cameras though but don’t point the camera towards the sun too long or you’ll be needing a new one as it’ll burn out various components with the heat.

You’ll find lots more info on this on NASA’s solar eclipse site.

French banking practices are very different from those in the UK in several key areas and it’s those differences that we’ll concentrate on here.

Conseilleurs

In the UK, a bank advisor is there to do things like advise you what to invest your money in and to sell you insurance but in France Conseilleurs don’t do anything as complex as that and are required to do really simple stuff like changing a direct debit or opening a savings account. This wouldn’t be so bad but you always need to make an appointment to see “your” advisor because, for reasons which escape me, the others that may be there on the day you go in can’t do that kind of simple task for you.

Of course, this approach means that each advisor is clogged up with work at the trivial end of the scale. For example, if you want to open a savings account in the UK, you fill in a form, hand in ID and cash and the cashier opens it there and then. Here it can take several weeks to open even the simplest account. So, ’tis best to develop a relationship with your advisor here as you’ll be making untold numbers of appointments to see them.

In the UK, a bank advisor is there to do things like advise you what to invest your money in and to sell you insurance but in France Conseilleurs don’t do anything as complex as that and are required to do really simple stuff like changing a direct debit or opening a savings account. This wouldn’t be so bad but you always need to make an appointment to see “your” advisor because, for reasons which escape me, the others that may be there on the day you go in can’t do that kind of simple task for you. Of course, this approach means that each advisor is clogged up with work at the trivial end of the scale. If you want to open a savings account in the UK, you fill in a form, hand in ID and cash and the cashier opens it there and then. Here it can take several weeks to open even the simplest account. So, ’tis best to develop a relationship with your advisor here as you’ll be making untold numbers of appointments to see them.

Overdrafts in the UK are “permanent” in that there is no problem in running an account that is constantly in the red. In France, you can only be overdrawn for 10 days per month and for the rest of the month the account must be in credit. That said, you can get a permanent overdraft facility from some of the proper banks. They all seem to implement this by giving you a credit card which is linked to your current account; when you are overdrawn outside the 10 day limit an automatic cash advance from this card takes you back into credit. French banks don’t charge cash advance fees so in practical terms this gives you something that works very like a UK overdraft.

Debit cards come in two basic varieties: immediate debit or deferred debit. Immediate debit operates just like a UK debit card ie purchases are charged to your account right away. With deferred debit, your purchases are charged to your account at the end of the month. In both cases there is a spending limit of around EUR 3000 per month and a withdrawal limit of EUR 300 per week.

Credit cards are quite rare in France at the moment but operate much the same as in the UK with the exceptions that there is no cash advance fee and they charge per transaction for all international purchases. Interest rates are generally higher than in the UK too. The other difference is that the amount you repay per month isn’t a set percentage but goes in bands eg EUR 15 or EUR 30 per month.

Store cards are available but usually require proof of your French income so can’t be obtained until a year or two after you get here. The one exception that we’ve found is Auchan which offers you it’s store card about a year after you sign up for it’s loyalty card and doesn’t require anything beyond a passport.

“Discuss” is probably one of the worst words that can be used in an exam or assignment question.

Why? Well, because, on the whole, you’ve no idea whether or not your answer is anywhere near complete no matter how much you work on it. A seemingly excellently written answer can end up in fairly low marks whilst at the same time an answer that you might feel is very poor comes back with really high marks.

The problem is, of course, that unless you are very good at the subject you won’t really know for sure if you have included all relevant aspects in the discussion for a start. It is possible to get really high marks on a “discuss” question but, by and large, I think that for a whole lot of people the mark coming back seems almost random. For example, if there are five points on the marking sheet then miss just one and there’s potentially 20% out the window even if you address the other four points perfectly.

And, yes, this post has been prompted by a “discuss” question that I’ve just submitted. I’ve loads of references in it so, in principle, the mark should be reasonable but, really, I’ve no idea whether it’ll be 50% or 80%. Still, one big plus point is that it doesn’t actually matter as I’ve already passed the assignment section of the course.

For most people the answer is simple: they’ll look it up in their favourite price comparison site.

They’d not find it there, or at least they would but the ranking systems used don’t always mean that the cheapest card pops up on the top of the list, especially when you consider that the majority of such sites are financed by income from affiliate links so there’s generally a certain amount of bias built in. Anyway, because of this I thought that I’d look through all the offers around and find which one was really the cheapest.

That wasn’t nearly so simple a task as you might think. Although there are rules about how they should display their charges in fact that tends not to work to the advantage of the lower charging cards as much as you might expect.

Anyway, I thought that I’d finally got it sussed and it was the ICE travel money card that was far and away the winner. After all, it was free to issue and renew when all the rest charged, so how could it not be the best? Well, the FairFx card was coming in at £1 per withdrawal vs £1.75 a go for ICE so at some level of spending FairFX would pull ahead of course. Still, it was £10 to issue and £6 to renew so you’d need a more than 10 cash withdrawals a year for it to be cheaper.

But then a few days after I posted the article, I found out that you can get the card free (via the link here) which levelled up the playing field and then I checked further into the exchange rate charge and they only charge 1%. I still don’t like cards that charge though and that £6 renewal charge was there albeit only every three years.

However, now it turns out that the FairFX people have free renewals so long as you topup your card at least once every three years so in fact what seemed like a potentially high charging card turned out to be the cheapest one by a long way.

And that’s the snag of the charges tables that the rules insist on: the FairFX card doesn’t sit well in them because, by and large, its charges are conditional. The £10 issue fee is optional in fact but clearly stated in the table. Likewise for the renewal fee. Their currency conversion charge is “about 1%” because they give you the best available at the time so they don’t seem to be able to state that in the charges table.

Anyway, you can read the full review over on my other blog.

If you’re going a fair distance and will be in a country where you have relatives then chances are that you’ll have to see them.

However, don’t forget that this can substantially distort “your” holiday. For one thing, if you’re going far enough they’ll probably feel obliged to organise lots of stuff for you to see and do whilst you’re there. If they’re cousins who you’ve never seen or perhaps ones who you’ve only seen at home and this is a return visit then you can pretty much forget about going to where you might want to go.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to have them offer to take you around various places but you can sometimes end up getting dragged round all the relatives in the area which can seriously eat up holiday time. If that looks likely to happen you need to be clear on why you’re going to visit them: is it because you’re going to that country anyway and dropping in to say “hi”, or is it specifically to see them? The answer makes an enormous difference. For example, we were going around the world once and planning on dropping in to see one family along the trip but some people over here couldn’t understand why we weren’t spending our entire holiday with them!