Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

One of the big surprises in many ways is just how fast formerly eastern block countries are moving into the first world.

For example, not so many years ago the thought of a  luxury golf property in Bulgaria would have been laughed at. No longer though for the likes of Tharacian Cliffs, starting from scratch, seems likely to become one of the top golf courses in the world according to Gary Player.

The reason is simple of course: they’re able to start from a blank sheet and have lots of cheap land and labour to construct the courses. For the rest of us there are increasing numbers of cheap flights available to get us to the area.

Overall, a win-win situation for everyone apparently.

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.

Sadly, we’ve just heard the news that some ******** have broken into our house in France and trashed the place.

What seems pretty much a cert is that the things that they took (seemingly less than a dozen things in total although we need to do a full check) will be appearing in one of the vide greniers (car boot sales) over this weekend. Some of their customers will be less than pleased with their purchases as they include, among other things, a TV that can’t receive French TV programmes and a number of region 1 DVDs that won’t play on French DVD players.

It isn’t so much the things that they’ve taken which is annoying though: it’s that they simply trashed most rooms in the house looking for stuff that just wasn’t there. Thanks to the high prevalence of the black economy in France, most French households are likely to have quite a pile of cash stashed away but us foreigners just don’t work like that so their cash take amounted to a few euros at best.

In other countries there’d be an insurance claim, of course, but in France the insurance only pays out when you have the original receipts and, for the most part, people don’t have them so you end up paying a whole lot for insurance that realistically you will never be able to claim on.

Anyway, it looks like our notional holiday will be taken up with cleaning up the mess that they’ve left behind and wasting time with the insurance company.

Seemingly without fail, the social services people lurch from one extreme to another in how they treat cases.

Whilst they obviously failed Baby P very badly, they’re now in the process of going out of their way to fail the babies of Mr & Mrs N. Thanks to a joke remark from Mrs N it seems that the social services feel that the best thing to happen is that her children should be put up for adoption.

Oh, it’s not just the off-hand comment she made, of course. There’s the matter of her being angry that social services took her children from her so she clearly has anger issues. Why were they taken into care? That’s because the first time parents were having difficulty in looking after the premature twins. Well, if that’s the reason then I think that the social services people would be best to take ALL babies born to first-timers into care. What first-time parent could honestly say that they didn’t have trouble looking after their children in the early days?

Of course, as with Baby P, it’s the children that are getting the worst of this. In the critical early days after birth the twins only get to see their parents for ten hours a WEEK. That’s not nearly enough to establish a firm attachment and will almost certainly affect their later development.

Sure parents won’t be perfect carers at the off. How could they be? But they’re almost always the best possible carers that a newborn will ever have. It’s not right for social services to exercise this draconian power with such impunity. One hopes that disciplinary action will ensue WHEN they lose the case over this.

Since the insurance needs of companies tend to be more sophisticated than those of individuals you generally don’t find the equivalent of online price comparison sites in the company insurance market that you expect in the personal insurance market.

So to get corporate insurance you will almost always need to go to a specialist insurance broker which obviously means looking at firms relatively close by your business premises.

However, it’s worse than that in that, for example, to shop insurance Glasgow, if you’re in a relatively specialised market niche you’d need to look for, say, insurance for contractors Glasgow. Well, “worse” in the sense that you may need to be more specific in your requirements of an insurance broker but if that broker is more familiar in dealing with your type of business you’ll generally save a lot of hassle in explaining what you do and won’t miss out on essential insurance that’s specific to your industry group. Not only that but the specialists will know more about the types of policy available to your industry niche too which can save quite substantial amounts of money.

Incidently, don’t be tempted to try to do the cheapo route of just using one of the personal insurance comparison sites as they usually don’t list essential items of business insurance and you could find yourself with an expensive problem should it turn out that you don’t have some legally required insurance or there’s an exemption in the insurance that you bought which means that you’re not covered for doing something that you do quite regularly. These things usually only become apparent after you need to claim on a policy which is obviously a little late in the day.