Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Although I’ve been plugging away with a series on living in France and you’d think that it would be something French that would be the most popular post on the blog, in fact it’s a post that is solidly in the expat finance field that is by far the most popular.

It’s, of course, our article on opening a bank account in America as a non-resident. Why? Well, for those that are running a small business on the Internet, the preferred way of getting paid is via PayPal which is brilliant for a small business as you get to accept credit card payments with no hassle at all. However, obviously you need to get the money out of PayPal and into a real bank account at some point and that’s where the problems start.

PayPal is basically an American payment scheme and only lets you transfer money out to a fairly limited number of countries. Crucially, that range of countries excludes quite a lot of Asia who are, of course, one of the most active business communities on the Internet.

If PayPal don’t support bank accounts in your country they give you only one other option: transfer money to an American bank account and so opening a bank account in America has become very popular. Unfortunately, the tightening up of security checks after 9/11 means that it’s quite difficult to open an account there or at least the options have closed up somewhat.

What’s happened then is that there has been a massive growth in websites offering to sell you the information for anything from $5 to $1000. Yes, up to one thousand dollars! Since I don’t charge anything for somewhat better information, the post in question has steadily moved up the rankings in google and indeed the corresponding entry in the expat resources section of the Whole Earth Guide has soared right up to the top of google too.

In fact the post has become so popular that I’ll be rolling out a similar guide for other countries which have been requested (Switzerland is next in line, the Channel Islands after that).

I’ve been thinking about the traffic that’s been arriving on this site over the last month or so and it would appear that the people most active in the “blog aggregators” are concentrated in the broad area of financial services for want of a better name for it.

To be fair, that sample of stats suffers from a bias in that I’m obviously only seeing the aggregation services that are picking up various articles on my blogs. However, the majority of my posts most definitely haven’t been in that financial services area yet the incoming links from the aggregators are disproportionately hitting topics in those particular areas.

For sure, there are aggregators out there looking at the travel end of things and whenever I write something about Hawaii and cruises in particular, then I can expect those articles to be picked up.

Anyway, that has me wondering if it would be worthwhile to kick off a blog aimed very specifically at that financial services area? For that matter, I’m also wondering if there’s money to be made with a blog aggregator: if nothing else, having other people doing all the work and having me banking the advertising income has a certain appeal.

It seems like forever since we had a whole day off so we’re thankful that there’s nobody in tomorrow and neither is it a school day so we get to lay in.

For me it’s a sort-of work day though as I’m down to only four days to go before the Spanish exam (the final one for the course). Still, at least that’s starting to come together and I can talk with the best of them about the society in Spain in the early part of the 20th century. At least, I can in Spanish…. as usual I can do some stuff in Spanish that I can’t in English.

Have to see about getting my case packed too as I’ve to fly out on Friday morning.

The pattern of bookings this year has been rather peculiar right from the start and seems to be continuing in the same vein.

Last night for instance, we had only one couple in although we really should have two but ‘tother one was one of our “visa application bookings” so we weren’t really expecting him to arrive.

Tonight, not only are we full, but everyone is taking meals too.

What October will be like, we’ve really no idea at the moment as the majority of people are booking just a few days to a couple of weeks ahead these days which means we generally have no idea how a given month will turn out ’til we’re well into it.

One thing that constantly surprises me is just how bad the stock control system is in Metro/Makro.

Despite billing themselves as the supplier to hotels, without fail they run out of hotel soaps in June every year and don’t get them back in stock until September. Hard as it may be to believe they’re even worse with the little shampoos which go out of stock in May or June and usually don’t come back until well into October. They do have loads of the little body lotion bottles though which have been sitting on the shelves unsold since June (I marked one of the boxes way back so, yes, they are exactly the same boxes!).

I’m not just singling out one slippage either. Fanta? Not from June to August. Water? Very limited availability right throughout the Summer.

Don’t these people have automated reordering systems in place?