Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

What should you pack to go on a short trip?

One thing’s for sure: don’t think that you can just replicate your packing for a full-scale holiday because you’re just going to run up a bill for excess baggage for no reason at all. If you’re going for a long-weekend it’s just being silly to even consider a full-sized case that needs checked in: carryon is the only way to go.

What should you bring though?

In terms of clothing, that depends on the temperature difference between where you live and where you’re going. Clearly if it’s Winter at home and Summer at the destination (or vice versa) that will dictate you having an extra change of clothing above what it would otherwise.

Essential items should be trimmed down to the minimum. That minimum should include:

1. passport;
2. credit card, debit card and cash card, all international versions (ie with a Visa/Mastercard on the credit/debit cards and Plus/Cirrus on the cash card). Make sure one is Visa and the other Mastercard as acceptance isn’t equally widespread in all countries and max three cards in total in case they’re stolen.
3. driving license (even if you don’t plan on driving);
4. plane tickets (or their electonic equivalent ie the booking number);
5. electical adaptor for foreign electrical sockets (get a “world” version rather than just a “european” one to cover all the bases);
6. guidebook (sometimes they’re not available locally in English)

And, of course, personal items such as contact lens solutions, glasses, sunglasses, womens items, and the like.

Ideally, all the stuff you’re taking should fit in a supermarket carrier bag. Any larger, and it’s definitely too much for a weekend break!

Whilst we had loads of housebuyers staying with us in 2004 and 2005, 2006 saw none of them at all.

Who knows why? The UK interest rates weren’t much higher than they were the year before nor did there seem to be a big difference in the UK house prices.

It’s the same this year too ie no big difference. Yet, we’re just into the main house-hunting season (usually October to March) and already we’ve had three separate house-buying families call in with us. Whether this is the sign of a major buying spree is a good question but at least it’s a sign of the start of a movement in the French market.

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.

This is our first “day off” for a while so we’re at a bit of a loss as to what to do!

Funnily enough, it feels very much like a Saturday so far, though why that is, I just don’t know.

We had our usual “Saturday morning” lay-in so everything is running later than usual. Somehow we’ve gotten to lunchtime already yet we’ve not done any of our usual morning things yet!

As we’ve been a bit lazy, we’ve all the rooms in the place to make up sometime between today and tomorrow morning so that’ll keep us out of trouble once we get going on it.

Wendy’s next in line for the computer (we’ll have two from next week: no more queuing!!!) so I’m off to have another look at the Spanish.