Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

It’s usually taken as read that an accountancy job is a job for life but these days that’s no longer the case and that there is such a thing a specialist accountancy recruitment agency should be no surprise to anyone.

The particular difficult with accountants is that there can frequently be tie-in, no-competition and no conflict of interest terms in their employment contract. So, it’s not quite so easy to move jobs or to find a new accountancy job even in normal times as it is with “normal” jobs and, of course, these are far from normal times so it’s that much more difficult these days.

That said, if you’re searching for, say, “accountant jobs Edinburgh” you will find jobs around with some of those at quite surprisingly high levels. What you will see though, courtesy of the contract restrictions above and, of course, non-disclosure that there’s very little meat to the job descriptions and you’ll usually need to formally contact the employment agency to find out more should you be attracted to one of those on offer. In many ways that’s something of a nuisance but unfortunately it’s something that isn’t easily avoided.

So, if you fancy being a qualified accountant in Edinburgh there are definitely possibilities, just allow for needing to contact the agency rather than relying on information on the website listings.

With the world economy falling apart around us this is one of those times where many people wish that they had invested in gold as, of course, with everything else falling gold is doing quite nicely as usual.

The key thing is to keep your savings and investments diversified and moreover to keep to a regular savings and investment programme. If you’re doing that, it shouldn’t really matter whether the price of gold is sitting around the $200 mark or if it’s sitting at the $900 mark since, as with all investments, it’s pretty much impossible to hit the bottom of the market when you’re buying and it’s equally difficult to hit the top when you’re selling. That said, the gold price is currently off the top achieved in May.

But if you’ve decided to buy some gold bullion for a rainy day, how do you go about it? In principle there are all kinds of investment schemes around these days which let you buy a share in a pile of gold and that’s a sensible way to go about it in that the costs are lower than they are if you some gold bars. However, that lower cost comes at a price, namely that you’re trusting that some intermediary actually has that piece of gold for you and that, should they go bankrupt, that you’ll be able to get your little piece of gold. Certainly these firms have all kinds of reassuring things to say about that but at the end of the day, to my mind, there’s nothing to beat having a lump of gold in your hand.

If you’re aiming at looking after the gold yourself it’s relatively easy to buy it these days by way of Bullion by Post who offer the usual range of investment sizes of gold bars. In terms of bars, the smallest that you can get is the one ounce bar which weighs in at around £600 these days (the price varies throughout the day) or you can get the one kilo bars that you see in photos of Fort Knox and the like for around £19000. The larger bars carry less of a premium over the spot price for gold (ie they are cheaper per ounce of gold) but unless your portfolio is really large the larger bars aren’t going to be terribly practical purchases for you.

One thing to bear in mind if you’re collecting these things in your house is the security and insurance aspect. Clearly if you are stockpiling gold in your house you’re building up a major asset and your insurance company would want to see it adequately protected. It’s possible to avoid this hassle by using a safety deposit box in your bank which will save on the insurance and you may be able to get it free too depending on your bank.

Did you ever think that somebody was out to get you?

The riots across France last week were right at the time we’d have ordinarily been driving up to the ferry.

The ferry that we’d have been going on was the one that ended up with a lorry hanging out the back of it.

And, last week the whole of southern France was hit with major league storms which have knocked down a couple of our trees!

For personal reasons I’ve ended up pretty much commuting between the UK and France over the last three weeks or so and it’s left me with a backlog of both e-mail and post like you wouldn’t believe.

What’s slightly depressing about this is the speed with which I’ve been able to make serious inroads with the backlog thanks, of course, to the massive amount of it that is junk mail. It’s going to be a longer slog with the post though as it’s not nearly so easy these days to identify what’s junk and what’s real stuff.

Still, at least I can see the bottom of the junk e-mails for the moment.

That’s a question that’s even more difficult to answer this year as there’s not only the problem of the exchange rate making everywhere much more expensive but then there’s the oil price which can mean that your holiday increases in price after you’ve booked it.

Throw in the need for a consensus amongst the family as to where you’re going and what you’re doing when you get there and it’s something of a nightmare this year.

And, of course, those holidays are just around the corner and prices are liable to leap since everyone has been putting off booking anything this year…