Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

You’d think that that these days banking practices around Europe would be fairly standard. After all, the banks handle international business every day so they’re in constant contact with their counterparts in other countries.

Of course, it’s one of many areas where European business practices are far from standard.

Take the UK and France for example. Two countries with a very long history of interaction so you’d think that many things would be similar except that they aren’t.

In the UK, credit cards are commonplace and it’s normal, expected even, for people to have several of them. In France, credit cards are a relatively new phenonmen and remain very rare.

In the UK, almost everyone has an overdraft and the banks prefer you to be permanently overdrawn as they collect more fees that way. In France, they’ll close your account if you’re overdrawn more than a couple of months.

In the UK, debit cards don’t have any purchase limit on them. In France, you can’t buy more than 3000‚€ a month usually, which is why you often see people resorting to cheques towards the end of the month.

In the UK, nobody will accept a cheque without a cheque card (a card issued by their bank and guaranteeing the cheque will be paid). In France, almost everyone until recently accepted cheques because if you bounced a cheque you could be banned from having a cheque account at all. That actually worked well until very recently when the economic situation seems to have caused something of a run on dud cheques so the effect is that more and more businesses don’t accept cheques which is sure to cause trouble soon so long as that debit card spending limit remains.

Any one of those differences can easily fell you if you don’t know about it in advance.

Standing apart from the system these days we’ve not noticed first hand all of the chaos that has resulted in some of the reorganisations of UK government departments over the last year or two but can only laugh at some of it from afar.

Perhaps the best example is the Child “Tax Credit” and Child Benefit combination.

For political reasons, the Child Tax Credit is called a tax credit although, in all but name, it’s clearly a benefit payment. You claim it exactly like a benefit and it’s paid exactly like a benefit so it’s only the name that differentiates it. And that’s the problem: seeing as it’s been called a “tax credit” then it can’t be integrated with the Child Benefit systems thus saving a fortune on duplication of administrations and reducing the errors being made in payments.

That’s a recent one of course but the National Insurance Contributions have long been separate from Income Tax. The bands at which both are levied have been aligned for quite a while now so there’s no reason to keep them separate other than the political double-speak that called the National Insurance scheme an insurance scheme when in fact it’s merely another tax. If it were an insurance scheme then it would build up some money in the kitty but, of course, it doesn’t as the money is paid out as it comes in.

So when will common sense prevail and such nonsenses be put to an end? Somehow I can’t see it being anytime soon as there are just too many interested parties who it suits to have the current system perpetuated.

Whilst moving from one European country to another is as easy, at least legally, as moving from one American state to another, it’s a whole different matter when you want to emmigrate to a completely different jurisdiction.

Aside from all the normal differences in taxes, social security and health systems that moving countries always entails, you add the complication of needing to apply for a visa, residence and work permits which adds considerably to the time that it requires to make the move as well as increasing uncertainty somewhat.

For example, take the relatively simple case of a British citizen wanting to move to Canada.

Canada is, of course, in the British Commonwealth so, in theory, that should make the move easier. However, even if you have a pretty much perfect points score for the move, it currently takes around four years from initial application through to the point where you have your Canadian visa and can actually move.

That’s a very long time and a great deal can change during it. For example, four years ago I had one son and now I have two. The second one would obviously need to be added to the visa application for a start and there’s the complication that he has even more nationalities than the first little guy.

Such a long lead time seriously complicates matters in other areas. For one thing, you’ll be working in your existing job and not know in advance how long. You may be wanting to move house too over that kind of time. It’s even possible that the visa categories which you’re eligible for could change too if, for example, you had an inheritance you might find that you could apply under one of the investment categories or perhaps you added a qualification (eg I picked up a university French diploma within the last four years which adds significant points to my Canadian application) or skills. The list is endless.

In fact, over that time period your life could change radically so you need to be really set on moving to a particular country if you’re talking of application periods running into years. Yes, of course, you should be that determined but over such a long period many things can crop up to change your mind even if you originally were really set on making that particular move.

And, remember, that’s just for a relatively simple move!

As it’s the third Monday in January today, it’s Martin Luther Day.

Well, more or less, as America is, as we all know, a country that’s built from a whole bunch of separate countries (ie states) and therefore it doesn’t have a standard name in all 50 states and indeed wasn’t a holiday in them all until 2000.

Although it doesn’t really mean anything outside America, it does have a knock-on effect worldwide in that various Internet outfits close down since they’re based in America. In fact, we didn’t even know that it was a holiday ’til we started wondering why there were so few sponsored posts available today.

Not that we’re complaining as it would appear a lot of folk doing sponsored posts have also taken the day off so we’ve picked up several juicy ones whilst they’ve been away.

Once we get into the summer season, there’s really no chance of us keeping up with anything that isn’t essential to the day to day running of the place and one of those “non-essential” things is keeping the accounts up to date.

It’s not that we’ve no idea what money is coming in and going out as we go along, just that the formal accounts don’t get kept up to date over the summer period. This year is particularly bad as there was a lot of additional work needing doing with our UK side of the business and so it’s really only now that we’re getting settled down to get the finances up to date.

Naturally, that long period since the relevant transactions makes life more difficult as it’s that much easier to lose the odd document along the way of course and getting the whole lot into a sensible sequence takes a whole lot longer than it would do if we were keeping up to date as we went along.

Having said that, overall it seems to take us a lot less time to do when we do the whole lot in bulk. This morning we went through the majority of the receipts over a couple of hours for instance whereas doing it a little bit at a time would consume a lot more time when you added it all up. In fact the biggest downside is that the whole thing feels much more like a chore when you’ve a big heap of documentations to work through than when you’ve only a couple of bills to mark off.

Fingers crossed, we’ll have tidied it all up by next week and then it’s off to the accountant with it.