Foreign Perspectives

You might think that all the sensible short domains have long since gone but if you play around with a domain search for a while you’ll find that surprisingly good names are still around.

Granted, you’re essentially wasting your time trying to pick up a three letter one no matter what the TLD (the bit after the dot) is. Although, having said that, there are some that come up now and again. In principle even one and two letter domains can be had but, in most cases, only if it’s a direct transfer from the current owner to a new owner as any that are not renewed are now permanently out for the majority of TLDs.

However, at four letters, there are lots of decent domains still around. To pick up one you need to get the creative juices flowing. Add a number or hyphen and you’ll dramatically increase the possibilities for yourself: I picked up arn7.com not so long ago and it’s one of many with a digit even within the very popular .com TLD. For personal domains, think of .me: I picked up sfol.me a while back for instance. If you’re planning on mainly using it for email it’s probably better to aim for something like .me rather than .com as it’s that little bit shorter when you’re writing it out.

Pricing-wise, it’s probably best to avoid .tv as it’s generally thought of as a commercial domain and is therefore more expensive to register but other than that many TLDs are at normal prices and, quite importantly, without geographic restrictions eg you don’t need to live in Macedonia to register a .me nor in Tuvalu to register a .tv.

You usually expect companies to put a positive spin on their products, even when they’re not so good so I try to downplay such messages in my mind to see what the true picture is.

So, I was a bit thrown by the recent car insurance renewal from Axa. They had their main marketing message in big letters (“10% discount for renewing online” and the usual promotion of the insurances that you don’t yet have with them). However, the insurance renewal at £78/month seemed a bit expensive and when I checked it certainly was as it was only £25/month last year. Net effect of that being that I was getting together the information I needed to get a quote elsewhere. After all, tripling the insurance was a bit much.

They are just lucky that I read a bit further though. It seems that the £25/month was actually over 9 months with an initial deposit bringing the total to around £275 whereas the £78/month is over three months with an initial deposit bringing the total to almost exactly the same total.

Talk about bad marketing! I wonder how many customers they’re going to lose by presenting an insurance quote that appears to triple the cost but actually leaves the total almost exactly the same?

After booking our day-trip to Glasgow, a promotion for a day-trip to Ayr popped up: £16 for the four of us instead of the usual “cheap-rate” of £40 (or £30 if you book in the Stenaline offices). I’ve passed through Ayr a number of times over the years but never stopped to look around so I hadn’t a clue what there was to see there but at £16 you can’t really go wrong, so we booked it.

As with all day-trips involving any kind of boat or plane, there’s an early start. In this case, you’ve to be there no later than 7am and, of course, allowing for parking and whatnot that really means more like 6.45am. The ship doesn’t depart ’til 7.30 but the cheap trips over the holiday period are very popular so there was quite a line to checkin and it was quite a crowded trip. Arrival in Cairnryan is a little before 10am.

The ship was the quite nice Superfast, although with the trip taking almost 2.5 hours, it didn’t seem that fast. Food in the restaurant isn’t cheap but the prices aren’t too over the top. It’s best to grab a seat as soon as you get on as the available seats are taken up really quickly on the more crowded crossings. There’s the usual arcade games and small cinema (aimed mainly at the kids) with a spa along with assorted treatments for the adults. They’ve a small number of suites (for up to five people) which, at £20, might be worth it after a tiring day though, of course, you’ll only have use of it for a couple of hours.

The two coaches should have been setting off not much after 10 with arrival in Ayr scheduled for 11.15am. However, in practice, the coaches waited around for no apparent reason so we didn’t get into Ayr until more like 11.45 which, together with an earlier than scheduled departure shortened our time there by quite a bit. The coaches are listed as dropping off at the Burns statue but actually drop off near the Stagecoach bus station. That doesn’t really make a lot of difference if you’re only walking around the town but if you want to take a side-trip it is handier to be beside the bus station.

What’s to see? It’s a fairly pretty seaside town with lots of Georgian architecture, quite a number of bridges and a reasonable number of fairly historic buildings (mostly converted to new uses). The narrow streets are quite pleasant to stroll around. On the beach there’s a large childrens’ playground (which could do with a fair bit of maintenance) with an adjoining indoor children’s entertainment centre (about £5 for two hours, depending on age, weekday/weekend/holiday).

Slightly outside the town there are:

1. The Robert Burns museum,  which you can get to easily enough by bus. It costs about £20 for a family and seems to include quite a bit to interest for a couple of hours.
2. The Heads of Ayr Farm Park, seems to have something for everyone and seems easy enough to get to by bus. You’d need to allow a fair chunk of the day to get best value (about £40 for a family).

Catering-wise, the town is well served with lots of decent quality but fairly cheap restaurants all around the town.

One of the things that’s quite handy about the Open University is the library.

Since the OU is a distance learning university, the library, for most people, is fully online. It’s got subscriptions to hundreds of journals, mainly aimed at the various courses that they run and, usually, they’re downloadable as PDFs. What you can’t, usually, do is to download a complete issue of one of the journals unless you do it article by article but then, most of the time, you wouldn’t want to do that.

However, it also has a whole lot of books and many of these are available as PDF downloads. Although the OU online library doesn’t generally stock the OU course books it does hold those that are co-published. So, for example, you can download all the course books for the main chemistry course, S205, and for the oceanography course, S330, because those were co-published with the Royal Society of Chemistry and the equivalent earth sciences society.

In addition to those there are heaps of books that are referred to in various courses. Of those, for me, the interesting ones are those referred to by the Metals and Life (S347) course as several of them are quite closely related to the medicinal chemistry masters that I’m thinking of doing.

What’s key is, of course, to do the downloading whilst still a student. One former student is now realising that looking a bit further ahead would have saved a small fortune in books.

The changes in pensions announced in the recent UK budget were quite staggering in their scope and I suspect that it will be several years before the full implications of them dawn on most people.

Ignoring the minor, but quite significant, changes the biggie was that as from April 2015 your pensions savings effectively becomes a proper savings plan ie one where you can take the money out. Up to now, pensions often seemed to be an insurance company scam whereby you paid them money over your working life and when you retired they kept that money and paid you out an allowance from it. As of April 2015, so long as you are over pension age (usually 55), you can withdraw those savings.

That to me changes significantly how I consider my pension. Money put into it is no longer lost to some insurance company but is available to me just as my other savings are. One of the effects of that is that I’m much more willing to save money in the pension which can only be a good thing.

Another effect is that it somewhat muddies the waters as regards the difference in a pension and an ISA. In effect both are now fairly equivalent places to invest your money. With the pension, you get tax relief on the way in (ie put in £100 and it becomes £120 in the pension but income paid out is taxable) whereas with the ISA there’s no upfront tax relief but you don’t pay tax on any income paid out. This means that, for most people, a pension is a better savings vehicle as they are likely to be paying higher tax when working than when retired. Also, the limits are different with the pension being, largely, limited to your total income whereas the ISA is limited to £15,000 ie there’s, for most people, no practical limit on pension savings.

Combined with the new freedom, it would seem that it’s best to put your investments in a pension and your cash in an ISA.

A final point to note is that with pensions effectively becoming jumbo ISAs, there are likely to be a lot more investment companies offering them which, hopefully, will reduce the charges in due course.

What I suspect will throw many people is that all of a sudden their pension has become a, hopefully, large savings account. What you need to remember is the reason behind pensions which was always to create a large savings account which paid you an income for the rest of your days ie lifting the lot and spending it as soon as you retire could cause you considerable financial difficulty later on.