Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

One thing never to neglect when you’re living abroad is the cost of changing money from one currency to another yet virtually nobody considers it.

The costs can be quite substantial too. A friend of mine who was living in Brussels once casually remarked that he just used the Halifax as he did at home, lifting EUR 20 or EUR 30 whenever he needed it. He was more than a little takenaback when I pointed out that by doing that he was paying around 10% of his entire salary in bank charges. Yes, that much.

We’ve had quite a run of Brits living in Spain stopping with us on their way to/from the UK this year and I was very surprised to find that only one of them used the Nationwide credit card. Yet, that’s the only one that offers free exchange from sterling to other currencies (and all of the people concerned were living on a UK based income).

The other alternative for euro-zone countries is the Halifax which operates as Banco Halifax in Spain. They offer free transfers from UK based Halifax (and Bank of Scotland) accounts to Halifax in Spain. Although they don’t currently operate elsewhere in Europe, the Spanish outfit is quite sufficient for those in eurozone countries as you can, of course, use the supplied debit card outside Spain for purchases (it’s a bit expensive for ATM withdrawals outside Spain).

Very handy and the whole thing operates in English.

One thing that you can always depend on is that the Spanish will arrival after everyone else and, usually, expect to be able to eat out in a restaurant no matter how late it is.

Quite why they’re so late is anyone’s guess as they usually have the least distance to travel, normally at most a couple of hours from Barcelona. Naturally, they expect to be able to eat quite late as that’s how things work in Spain but it’s quite a different matter in France where locally the restaurants usually won’t serve you after 8.30pm. That’s something of a problem in that the Spanish normally don’t even think about going out for their evening meal until 10pm by which time they’re limited to McDonalds.

Quite why we’ve so many Spanish arrivals this year I don’t know but it’s probably for similar reasons to our large German contingent ie high euro plus expensive “discount” flights meaning that the advantage is towards people who are going to drive here. August is a peak holiday season in Spain but in years gone by all the gaps that they’ve been booking this year have already been filled by the brits.

Of course, the big question is what’ll happen at the notional end of the holiday season here which falls this year on August 23rd? Historically, we’ve been fairly full with UK guests in the final week of the month but, as I say, there’s not so many coming from there this year (funnily enough those that have come have stayed for longer than the average of previous years).

If you cast your mind back to the early part of the year you might remember that we picked up a really big booking from a German family in February. So large that what started off as a couple of rooms for a few days ended up totalling 30 nights worth of accommodation over the course of a week or so.

The snag was that they never responded to any of our e-mails so it wasn’t until they arrived that we found out they were here to go to a wedding and spending the extra time to get aquainted with the French half of the family who live locally. The downside of that for us was that we only picked up the money for the rooms as they didn’t even take breakfast whilst they were here so we’ve had a relatively restful week.

For them, the lack of response meant that they weren’t even aware that our booking conditions for groups are quite different from those for individual rooms until they checked out this morning. For normal bookings we only charge for the rooms when people leave and if they cancel at least 24 hours in advance they don’t have to pay anything. For groups, we charge the full balance for the rooms a week before they arrive and it’s not refundable unless we can rebook the rooms.

So, we’re sitting with the place half-empty in the peak of summer at the moment. Although we’ll almost certainly rebook some of the rooms it doesn’t seem too likely that we’ll rebook the whole lot as we only found out this morning that they were leaving four days early which is just a few days before the main French holiday of August (the 15th) ie most people coming to the region on holiday will already have booked their accommodation and therefore there’s a fair chance that we’ll remain relatively empty for the next few days.

I’m sure that if we’re honest, many people would say they’d skip on car insurance if it wasn’t compulsory.

However, there are times when it’s a pretty handy thing to have. Consider one of our guests last night….

What happened is that his car caught fire as he was driving along the motorway in France yesterday afternoon. That’s not really something that you expect to happen, is it? Anyway, the towing would have been several hundred euro, the transport to his hotel over EUR 100, the hotel another EUR 80 or so and it looks like the repairs will cost well over EUR 1000. Oh, and then there’s the not so insignificant matter that he’ll probably end up having to fly home and then back to collect the car as this is a holiday week and so it probably won’t be repaired for at least another week.

OK, a none too likely scenario for most of us I’m sure but it shows just how quickly the bills can mount up.

One of the first shocks that you get when you start your own business is the extra cost of business accounts. Whilst the list of charges for personal accounts is usually fairly short, there seem to be untold numbers of things that banks feel the need to charge you for as a business.

Now, you would sort-of expect that they would charge you if you’re depositing large amounts of cash in that there’s obviously work involved in handling it. You probably also know that they charge a percentage of your credit card sales too and that there’d be a charge for the credit card terminal too. But setting up the terminal? Providing the software for it? Surely not?

Well, if you plan on taking everything from your own bank, yes, you probably will be charged for setting up the terminal and you probably will be charged for the software required to run the thing too (anything up to $500). Not only that, but try accepting card payments online and you’re potentially talking another $500 for the software that you’ll need to accept those payments too.

That’s just for the standard Mastercard and Visa acceptances too. Add American Express or anything else and you add to your costs yet again. Even commonly used things such as the ability to process customer not present transactions is generally seen as another opportunity to charge you.

What the bank won’t be too upfront about telling you is that you can get a merchant account from a separate organization. There are increasing numbers of these outfits around and the market competition is driving prices down with the likes of First Data providing free setup, free point of sale software and 24/7 service (something that, quite surprisingly, isn’t always provided by the banks) and things that you might expect to be standard but usually are billable such as reprogramming of the terminal.