Foreign Perspectives

As from April 2015, those in the UK will have the option of taking full control of their own pension fund which is a fantastic freedom from the shackles of the insurance companies that up to now have controlled almost all pensions investments.

Although there are many people who invest their own private pensions just as they do with their ISAs, there is also the option of transferring one’s company scheme and investing that too. That’s a much bigger deal as one’s company pension is often much more substantial than one’s ISA although, up to now, that was not terribly relevant as you couldn’t take full control of it.

How much more substantial? Well, I recently calculated roughly how much it might be for a colleague and the numbers were quite staggering. Taking a simple example of someone who’d worked 40 years for this employer, earning £40,000 per year, the total value was aroud £450,000. More interesting, the pension that the employer was paying on that equated to around 4.75% (say £22,000).

So, in principle, if he were to take the £450,000 and could get 4.75% or more from the investments, he would do better than his company scheme. However, that’s not the full story. When he died the £22,000 would be reduced to £11,000 for his widow and when she died, the payments would stop. If he took the £450,000 and invested it himself, the pension income wouldn’t reduce when he died and in due course his kids would get to keep the £450,000 (or whatever it was then worth).

It looks like a better deal, and the only question is: would many people actually do that? Although it may seem crazy not to, the amounts of money involved are quite scary, after all you’re getting to manage an investment fund more than 10 times your salary and that’s probably a good deal more than most people are used to dealing with.

One way to get the confidence that you’d need to take the money is to run a dummy portfolio over the 5 or 10 years preceeding your retirement which should give you an idea of how well (or badly) you would be running the investments. That way, when the day comes, you’ll know whether or not you could do it. Whether you’d have the confidence to take the money and run it is, of course, quite another matter.

Booking a cheap short-break holiday sounds really simple,  doesn’t it? Just pick a cheap flight from your local airport and off you go.

There are two problems with that approach though. First, there’s the flight times in both directions. Whilst 10am sounds reasonable enough as a departure time for our next trip it means a 7am departure from home which is a little early and forget about that 8am departure! Likewise, on the way back you don’t want to be shooting for morning departures from an unfamiliar city; much better to aim for late afternoon or perhaps early evening which a) gets you more time in the resort and b) gives you lots of time to organise the trip and allow for any mistakes you may make in the journey to the airport (eg our next trip involves a walk, boat trip and coach trip to reach the airport).

The second problem is the accommodation. In the off-season you can find that there are more flights going to a resort than there are reasonable rooms available to cope with the people arriving or that the reasonable rooms are way too expensive for a short break.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. For example, if you’re thinking of Madrid you could consider Madrid Norte rather than those right in the centre. Amersterdam is small enough that Amsterdam hotels generally don’t get split so much into regions and the small size of the place means that most are either in or close to excellent spots in the city and much the same applies for Lisbon hotels too. It’s even possible to shoot for romantic hotels in Florence (although do watch those tagged “boutique hotels” which can be considerably more expensive than normal hotels and may not offer much for that supposed exclusivity).

Prices in all the above aren’t too bad although do be wary of the “prices from X”. Sorting by price for a double room works well if you’re looking for a double room but if you’re bringing along the kids you can sometimes find that the hotel with the cheapest double room either doesn’t have family rooms or if it does they’re not the cheapest available in that destination so it pays to check out the prices of the first four or five hotels listed.

Way back in 2009, I finally got going on the first course for my psychology degree (ED209) and was intending to plug away with that over the following four or five years, working through DSE212, DD303 and DD307 along with a couple of other courses to make up the 360 point total. However, one of those “other courses” was SK277 (human biology) and that really got me fired up about biology so I ended up working through the rest of the biology degree which I’ve just about finished.

In the meantime, they totally reorganised the psychology programme and are mid-way through introducing a whole new range of courses that’ll ultimately mean that they’re offering three or four different psychology degrees in place of the one general one that existed when I started. Net effect of being mid-way through and me having done some of the old-style courses is that there’s a confusing choice of modules at the moment.

The new ones seem to have dropped the popular residentials but there’s one remaining on its final run this coming year. That therefore seems to me to be the best spot to start so I’ve signed up with DSE212 and the associated residential DXR222.

After that, it gets quite confusing and I’m not really sure what I need to do to complete the degree. In theory, I could do the old-style degree but that needs to be completed before the end of 2017 which in turn means that I would need to do up to four 60 point modules over two years which seems a bit much at the moment. If I don’t do that, I would need to complete under the new-style regulations which is the same number of modules but without the need to complete by 2017.

What modules though? On the new-style degree there’d be E102 and DE100 but that assumes that I can’t count any of my existing modules and some of those fall into the psychology camp. I don’t know what I need to do there at this point. At level 3 there’s the compulsory DE300 plus a choice of three or four others coming up depending on whether you want a general psychology degree, a forensic psychology degree or a counselling degree.

At the moment, the only thing I’m fairly sure about is that I’d need to do DE300, would probably need to do DE100 and would probably do EK313. So, another call to the SMT people is called for I think.

It seems like aeons ago when we were all routinely pampered with blankets, pillows, endless food & drink, socks, little “do not disturb” signs, toothbrushes, combs and even flight bags. Actually, you needed the flight bag to carry off all the goodies that you were given in those days. That was in economy too… in first class you’d have needed porters to take everything with you!

Everything is different now of course in the age of the discount airline. The food & drink only turns up if you pay for it, the flight bag has long since been consigned to history and they’ve even cut into the basics such as blankets and pillows which often aren’t even adequately stocked on planes never mind being at least the little bit overstocked as they were yesteryear.

Funnily enough it’s actually the summer season when travellers end up feeling cold or even freezing. That’s the season when everyone’s heading off to the beaches and leaving home when it’s fairly warm too so they’re travelling in their summer attire of t-shirts, shorts, skirts and light clothing generally.

What do you do about it though? Well, you could cart on a blanket and pillow but, frankly, you’d look like a complete plonker doing so and besides you’ve got to factor the weight into your greatly reduced luggage allowance. It’s also two carryon items which may not be allowed but anyway, do you really want to juggle two more things on your vacation?

With the science courses that I’ve been doing over the last few years, the books generally turn up about a month before the course officially starts and the associated website opens a few days before the course opens. Psychology is clearly a little different and the books have arrived nearly two months before the course starts with the website opening a month before the start.

In the box are:

• Exploring Psychological Research Methods, the 400 page book that I think you dip into throughout the course;
• Mapping Psychology, two volumes totalling 600 pages; and
• Challenging Psychological Issues at 200 pages which finishes off the course;
• a DVD video which has a number of relatively short programmes on it divided into five sections (these will play in a normal DVD player);
• a DVDROM which has a couple of animated sequences (although it’s easier in Windows, you can watch the videos by browsing to the folder on Linux and Mac or, of course, via VirtualBox); and
• SPSS (this is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows and you can use the OU license key for any of them).

Total page count at around 1200 pages is way below that of the equivalent science courses which generally weigh in with around 2000 pages plus associated DVDs (the extreme case being S205 with its seven DVDs). So, in principle, less work to do though I imagine that it won’t work out like that.

On the website will be the assessments, SPSS guide, audio clips and “much more”. Quite why they couldn’t have popped the guide and audio onto the DVD I don’t know as there seems to be the space for it.

One thing that I have noticed already is that I have already covered some of the ground in other courses. Thus one of the DVDROM animations is on perception which I did in some detail in SD329 a couple of years back and some of the topics touched on in the book were covered by the social psychology course that I did with coursera last year. That pre-knowledge should make some sections easier to work through.

With the SK320 exam looming in October, I’m planning on making a start on DSE212 now so that I can take a break from it when the revision work steps up.