Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

For those interested in France and perhaps thinking of buying a house in France at some point there are really only two property exhibitions that are worth considering which are the French Property Show in September and the Vive la France exhibition (now called The France Show) in January.

Anyone at all serious about property purchase in France should know of both of these or else they’ve been hiding out of reach of any France related publication. I had thought they were both so well known that there wouldn’t be any need to explicit advertising for either of them other than the mentions that both get in the numerous France property magazines.

And yet, they DO advertise, seemingly quite extensively. Why?

Well, my guess is that the punters were a little thin on the ground at the last exhibition in January 2007 as they certainly were very thin on the ground in France: we had no housebuyers staying with us at all during 2006. So, the organisers have hit the panic button this time to avoid any repetition.

Ironically, the housebuyers seem to be reappearing of their own accord so it’s probably going to be one of the most packed France exhibitions seen for some time. Of course, this just goes to show that people treat the Vive la France advertising more as a note of somewhere to go if they’re serious about buying than as something which puts them into a buying frame of mind. For really serious purchases such as for houses, advertising doesn’t change opinions a whole lot.

With the Winter upon us people divide into the cold and the warm holiday camps whenever ideas for Winter holidays come up.

Although the Summer is obviously the peak time for warm holidays, there are loads of warm holiday destinations available all year. For one thing, when it’s Winter in the northern hemisphere, its Summer in the southern hemisphere so you can always go to the Summer no matter what month it is.

But, of course, changing hemispheres is pretty expensive in terms of flights and whatnot which takes that out as a viable option for most people, or at least as a regular holiday option. Still, that leaves you with lots of choice of warm, albeit not hot, holiday destinations that are fairly cheap to get to.

For example, southern Spain is still in Summer temperatures even in December. In fact, it’s a much better time to visit southern Spain than in the peak of Summer as the majority of the tourists have gone home so you’re not fighting to get accommodation and the traffic on the roads is considerably less hectic than it is during July and August. Right now Stansted to Valencia can be done for under £30 return, including taxes.

Further south brings in more exotic options for your such as Morocco or Tunisia which combine Winter warmth with a more exotic culture and they’re both fairly cheap places in which to stay.

For all of these, I find that one of the best ways to skim through the options is via SkyScanner which can pull up all kinds of interesting locations that you wouldn’t normally think of.

I was leafing through the categories and funnily enough though I write a fair bit about both holidays and finance I don’t think I’ve ever written something that covers both!

So, with the Christmas holiday season coming up, how were you planning on financing the holiday? Christmas is perhaps the worst holiday to finance as you can have a “worst-case” scenario in terms of finance with the potential for both Christmas presents and a foreign holiday which makes for quite a big bill for some people.

In an ideal world, you’d have saved up for it all months in advance, but then this isn’t an ideal world, is it? Therefore many people are looking to borrow money to finance it all.

Fortunately, many people are in the same boat and therefore there are lots of offers of credit around at this time of year. As a rule, avoid store credit for the presents as this is often the most expensive form of credit and instead look towards the banks. If you’ve not used up all the 0% card offers, this is the time to get filling in the appropriate application forms which can get you up to 9 months interest free credit on purchases and, if you’re lucky enough, you might be able to finance both the Christmas presents and the holiday with one of these cards.

One thing to avoid though is the head in the sand approach that many people take. That attitude will almost certainly cost you dear and you’ll end up paying way over the odds for your borrowing. Even if you can’t get 0%, at least check what interest you’re paying on your credit cards and use the one with the lowest rate to buy whatever needs bought.

When you look around in a new country you generally bring all your preconceptions as to what a bank is with you.

Typically, the assumption is that a financial organisation is a bank if it issues credit cards, debit cards and cheque books whereas it’s a building society if it largely confines itself to savings accounts and mortgages. Of course, in many countries such distinctions don’t exist 100% of the time and there’s usually something of a graduated scale between building society and bank in most countries these days.

In fact, a more realistic distinction these days is probably based on size (however that might be measured) and perhaps the extent of international activities. So, for example, although most people would call the likes of the Halifax in the UK a building society in fact in both legal and practical terms it has been a bank for many years. For example, it has been issuing cheque books since the 1970s if not before and has had international activities for a substantial time too.

On the other hand, the various Credit Agricoles in France are clearly in the building society camp. Yes, they issue cheque books but their debit cards aren’t run by themselves and their international activities are nil, at least as far as the regional Credit Agricoles go.

Spain by contrast has the fairly substantial La Caixa which is a savings bank in name only although with few international activities up to now.

Some of the links that come up on websites are pretty peculiar, don’t you think?

Now, I can understand where they’re coming from when a google ad appears on the blog that’s related to France. After all, I have written a fair amount about France in the past. But hold on: since I’m not writing much about it now, how come google is putting ads on the site that relate to France so often? It shouldn’t be what I wrote about in the past that’s relevant but what’s on the page with the ad right now. Except that often it isn’t.

In a similar vein, the pages being picked up by Reuters are something of a mystery. They’re using some variant of a keyword sieve to select the articles so it’s understandable that my article titled As seen on Reuters is the most “popular”. Similarly those with financial type words in the title have been picked up too, or at least some of them have. Trying to work out what they are looking for will while away many an hour over the Winter I expect.

And then there’s the people who have selected this blog to advertise on. Goodness knows what they are looking for as it’s a complete mystery to me!