Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

One thing that really amazes me is how few people even think about what using their credit card abroad is costing them. For that matter, there is still quite a significant number of people who buy all their foreign currency in the Post Office assuming that “commission free” is exactly the same as “free” when, of course, it isn’t.

Taking a nice round amount of £100 for simplicity, that “commission free” purchase actually costs around £6.50. In fact, in some cases it can be cheaper to get the money from a place that charges commission as the exchange rate they use may be better. The cost to spend that amount abroad on most cards? Well, that’s just £2.75 (£7 if you lift cash out of an ATM with a credit card).

What about that nice prepaid card that the travel agent sold you? The £100 will cost around £30!!

But surely you have to pay no matter what you do? Well, no, you don’t. Get a Nationwide Building Society flexaccount and both cash withdrawals and purchases don’t have any foreign exchange charge.

More on this at our article on getting money abroad.

We are just rubbish at choosing accountants. It’s not that we don’t ask for recommendations because we do.

It’s that the first accountant recommended as “brilliant” to us turned out to be fine when they did the work but they just never got around to it with us.

The second came with an even more glowing recommendation and indeed she was that good. What she didn’t tell us was that she was going to be leaving the firm just a matter of months later and that the firm (apart from her) left quite a bit to be desired.

In fact they were so bad that when she left they never even bothered to open the files on her clients that she, of course, left behind. Net effect of that was that we (ie all such clients I imagine) only found out about her departure when we started getting threatening letters from the tax people saying that they were going to apply all kinds of penalties.

That was in September of last year. They finally completed the 2005 accounts just a few weeks ago (ie two years late) and still haven’t completed the 2006 accounts which is, of course, bringing in more penalty notices and quite laughable demands for money.

By and large, only the American produced series that have been running for more than a single series are picked up by the UK TV companies so we only see a fraction of the shows that are cancelled on this side of the water.

However, now and again shows are picked up before they’ve gotten the approval for a second series and, if that sample is anything to go by, some of the series that end up on the scrap heap are there for no particular reason or at least none that relates to the quality of the show itself. Generally speaking shows in the UK are allowed to run for a series or two to gather up an audience as it’s accepted that not every series will pull in the big numbers at the outset. OK, some dreary shows get through that process but then you don’t get silly things like Star Trek being cancelled long ago and only on the second run did that whole franchise really take off.

Odyssey 5 was one that bit the dust towards the end of its first season. It’s one of a group that were ongoing at that time centered around the idea of some kind of conspiracy and/or it being the end of civilisation as we know it (very common in the run up to 2000). Was it any good? It certainly wasn’t at the top end of that genre but it was well off the bottom end of it. As with many such series it seemed to be written with a 5 year cycle in mind (much more explicitly used on this particular series of course) so there were multiple subthemes running through the various episodes.

Many such shows at the time built elaborate subplots spanning series and with some major league plotting (Babylon 5 springs to mind as perhaps the ultimate such show) and perhaps there were just too many of them fighting for position in audience share at the time. Certainly there was a bumper crop of conspiracy shows from around the mid 1990s through to the early years of this century. As I say many of those pre-2000 ran with “end of the world” themes although with us being past 2000 now that kind of show isn’t nearly so common these days.

That used to be a relatively simple question to answer in that it began life broadly as a way of communicating with the folks back home so was effectively an expat blog. It dropped into that category more formally last year when it moved to the Foreign Perspectives domain and along the way the travelogue aspect of it became more prominent as well.

There was always a bit of an ongoing theme of finance cum investment which is a little more prominent these days if only because I pick a lot of paid posts on those themes. They’re not distorting the content of the blog per se as I’m just choosing them because they’re topics I find it easy to write about.

In fact, that “easy to write” is what is really the defining aspect of the blog. If I can write it easily, then chances are it will appear here. Sometimes that means that the content will fall into a neatly defined category, but quite often it just won’t.

For example, today I’ve quite a sizeable chunk of a post on video conferencing. If you read it you’ll see that it’s something I’ve used quite a bit in the past yet it doesn’t fall neatly into the expat cum travel aspects. Actually, lately there have been so many techie type things coming up that I’ve added a technology category, again because I find them easy to write (more techie stuff is on the techie sister site An Age of Magic).

So, now, we’ve expat things, travel things, finance things and tech things. Plus, now and again, stuff that’s “different” and which represent little experiments on my part to see if I can write about stuff outside the main themes of the blog.

Most of the time you just assume that the Internet runs 24/7 and that it doesn’t have a timezone as such.

That works fine for most people except that obviously many of the new “live chat” support services are generally only online during the business hours of the company providing them which, at the moment, usually means either the east or west coast of America which ain’t too handy for us folk in Europe. In fact, I’ve only once seen one of those services online when I was looking for it.

However, for me the bigger problem is that the paid posting outfits are generally on the east coast of America which is five hours off for us. Although in theory the opportunities are there 24/7 in practice the folk in the office put them on during their business hours of something like 9am to 6pm which, for us, means 2pm to 11pm although it looks like at least some of their staff work later than that as some opportunities come on after our bedtime. Net effect of this is that naturally the folk to the west of them get the majority of the high paying ones and in the morning we see all the great payouts that we missed during the night.

Sadly we’re a long way from it being economic for us to relocate to America or at least somewhere in their timezones so we can just gripe about it for now.