Foreign Perspectives

This is probably the worst time of the year in terms of bills with all the cost of Christmas just coming up and it’s not too long since vacation time either.

Add that all up and many people are finding that they’re short of money at the moment and looking around for a quick and easy way to raise some additional cash to tide them over until they get paid at the end of the month.

Therefore payday loans seem a very attractive option. They’re one of the easiest and quickest loans that you can get with the money deposited in your account within a few hours. Not only that but the lack of a credit check means that any credit problems that you may have aren’t an issue.

The requirements are really very basic:

1. You need income of at least $1000 per month.
2. You have been employed at your current job for at least 3 months.
3. You have had an active checking account for at least 3 months.
4. Your paycheck must be direct deposited into your checking account.
5. You are at least 18 years old.
6. You�aren’t delinquent on a previous payday loan.

Beyond that the only limitation is that the loan is intended to be repaid with your next paycheck (though it can be rolled over) and that the amounts are from $100 to $1500.

So that’s how they work, but is it worth getting one? If you can get the money somewhere else then no, they aren’t, because the costs are astronomical since all the administrative costs are being carried by what is a small short-term lone (hence the APRs of 300% and more). However, if you have no other option you need to weigh the cost of getting hit by late penalties on other finance that you have against what the payday loan will cost you and in such circumstances it may well be your cheapest option.

Normally people move from savings to investment but draw the line at risky investments and don’t consider gambling as being in the same continum.

But it is. Certainly savings and gambling are very much at the extreme ends of that continum but some high risk investments aren’t nearly so far from gambling as the investment community in general would have you believe.

Is it any more risky to put £1 on a horse or to put £1 on a penny share? Well, sure, it’s usually riskier to put it on a horse BUT remember that whilst you might put £1 on a horse, chances are it would be more like £1000 that you’d be putting on that penny share which is a whole lot more to lose.

Of course, that difference in the amount of money involved is critical in how you should rate a gamble as compared to a very high risk investment. However, don’t forget that even the safest investments are also gambles as any investor in Northern Rock will tell you now or for that matter policy holders in what was the even more solid Equitable Life.

It’s obviously impossible to name a single bank which you can choose simply because no single bank operates in every country of the world.

There are some general pointers as to how to go about choosing your bank though.

One school of thought is that you should choose the local bank with the most branches in the area which you’re moving to. That’s a reasonable approach in that for most countries there’s a charge to use ATMs that aren’t owned by your own bank so it may save you on ATM withdrawal fees. However, be wary of local banks that don’t operate internationally on a widespread basis or that don’t attract many foreign customers as you can come unstuck very easily through not having local banking practices explained to you. This even applies in many cases where banks operate English speaking branches: they might well speak English but often banking terms don’t translate well.

The other school of thought is that you should choose a bank based in your own country but with branches in your new country. This can work well in that the banking staff should be more familiar with the banking practices that you’re used to and sometimes offer good deals on money transfers to/from your home country. So, for example, if you’re American then the best choice is usually Citibank as that operates as a local bank in many countries yet retains an American feel in every location in which it operates and offers good deals on transfers between Citibank accounts in other countries. However, if you’re British, you might think that HSBC would be the way to go yet because it bills itself as “the world’s local bank” it tends to follow local banking practices more than British ones although it does offer transfers to your HSBC accounts in other countries.

Don’t forget that you don’t need to choose a single bank. One combination that works very well is a local bank with low charges and lots of branches combined with an international bank to handle your global transfers.

Post offices in many countries around the world offer a range of banking services these days, but are they really up to it?

Typically a small post office will have one counter to do everything. That works well when “everything” is mainly posting letters and parcels which take a few minutes to process.

Add on banking services and you’re into a whole different league in terms of the time that it takes to process a transaction though. For one thing, opening an account takes ages and delays everything. OK, it’s not something that happens every day but it happens fairly frequently: I spent getting on for an hour in a queue in a post office today which ended up snaking right round the available space and out the door because two people were opening accounts.

The problem really stems from the practice of governments to consider post offices in country villages to be a “good thing” and therefore worthy of support. That in turn leads to them being considered a job creation scheme so, of course, you wouldn’t want to add too much automation into them as then you wouldn’t create so many jobs. What automation that there is often is counter-productive: posting my three letters took nearly five minutes because the stamps had to be scanned in and destinations entered into the computer.

So, no, I don’t know that it’s really true to say that many post offices could be considered banks.

I’ve been looking at our booking stats covering the last year and wondering if we can go about running the place somewhat better in the coming year.

Thanks to the recession rolling around the world at the moment particular categories of guest don’t turn up much anymore. In particular, those looking for cheapo short breaks are obviously fairly thin on the ground in that the euro is pretty high compared to just about all the other currencies and also the flight prices from the various discount airlines are way up too (around five times the price in June 2008 compared to June 2007). That combination clearly has an effect on the booking patterns.

Now, on the whole we figure that whilst we’re here, we may as well be open. Fairly logical really. However, in that outside the main April to September season this makes for very few guests checking in we’ve been thinking that it would make more sense for us to be elsewhere over that time and we’re looking into the logistics of such a thing at the moment.