We may think the cheapest travel insurance will cover us for every eventuality but the reality is that all those hundreds of different policies are different and they have different requirements of what merits a payout and how much they will pay in compensation. When you take out a policy at half the price it is more than possible that you will get around half the cover, though not always.

Free bonuses of travel insurance with some bank accounts sound attractive but if you look into the detail it is likely you will get a basic policy with limitations on cover for valuable items you take with you on your trip. This could include mobile phones, computers and cameras as well as jewelry and even expensive designer handbags.

Deciding what might be an act of god and whether you would or would not be covered is another area of confusion but most of us would expect to be covered whatever happens and that is why we take out travel insurance.

Many of us view the prospect of studying the small print in any contract with horror but the events following the disruption caused by the ash cloud have shown that we all need to be more careful to check that a contract does match our needs.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

If we hadn’t just had the biggest warning of the potential for disaster that letting the banks have control of anything risks, I might be able to understand the enthusiasm some people have for this. Yes, it will be great not to have to carry cash with you when you go anywhere but how good will it feel when your cashless society decides to reject your credit card, debit card, automatic micro payment phone or whatever other system becomes the norm in years to come.

What happens when the banks go through another crisis and the system goes belly up for good? What do you do with a nation full of people who are unable to buy food or pay for services because the system has gone down? How would the country cope if, perish the thought, we were involved in a war that damaged our infrastructure so instant transactions could not occur for hours and maybe days?

Governments have a duty to keep the country prepared for things that might happen. It is the reason we keep an army available even if we are not fighting a war. It’s the reason we have emergency services who can respond when something does go wrong.

The idea that we might be dependent on a financial system that depends on greedy bankers and one that profits them every single time any transaction is made makes me feel very uncomfortable. The banks tried controlling the world recently and everything went pear-shaped. If we hand over control of all money and transactions to them it is hard to see what might stop them in the future.

I can see how appealing it would be to any government to avoid the significant cost of printing and minting currency as well as the appeal of having all transactions monitored in some way for taxation purposes but this seems like a very dangerous step for any nation to take and could even threaten democracy when banks have total control of money.

How would any government stand up to the banks when they can simply say they will stop the whole country from making any transactions at all if the government doesn’t do what the banks want. You cannot simply send the army in to run a financial system. We would be totally dependent on the good will and accuracy of the banking system and frankly, I don’t trust them.

Related posts:

1. Goodbye Electron Hello Mastercard Prepaid Card – How To Avoid Booking Fees At Ryanair The cheap flights airline Ryanair introduced a £5 payment fee...
2. When You Run Out Of Cash Stop Spending Another year is heading to a close and, as always,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Now I may be old fashioned but what they are actually doing is to penalise customers who want to take hold baggage? If they were incentivising they would be reducing the cost for those who travel light, wouldn’t they?

It should come as no surprise. Ryanair seems to care only about making money and if they could ship people in cattle trucks I expect they would be glad to reduce the price. There are, apparently, serious plans to charge customers to use toilets on short haul flights. I suspect that will be a financial mistake because who in their right mind will be paying rather steep prices for a cup of coffee or tea on the flight when it costs you a pound to get rid of it?

Apparently they plan to reduce the number of toilets and add a few more seats in their place. This may be the real reason for the proposed change but it makes traveling even more unpleasant if you need to worry about frequent use of the loo. Some people might find they end up spending more money on the loo than the flight cost them, if we ignore booking fees, baggage fees, checkin fees and a million other additional charges.

Time may prove me wrong but I suspect we have seen the peak of air travel as a pleasureable experience. I also suspect that we may see passenger numbers continue to decline even after the recession thanks to the feelings of disrespect air travelers now experience from airlines who are only interested in the bottom line on their accounts.

This is probably the most obvious example of a trend in recent years where companies are so concerned about reducing costs and making efficiencies and profits that they seem to have lost something from the customer experience. Yes, you can travel cheaper now than 20 years ago but is it a price worth paying? So many companies now seem to treat their customers as gold to be mined in the most efficient way possible with little thought apparently given to whether customers truly enjoy dealing with the company.

Companies like Ryanair will no doubt argue that customers continue to use their services because they are so cheap but is this really progress? Surely there is a middle ground where costs are managed but customers can still have a stress free experience, and are not left with the feeling they are being fleeced at every opportunity.

If the journey becomes a battle of wits between the company trying to find additional ways to charge you money and the customer trying to avoid the feeling of having been ripped off who really wins in the end? Probably nobody.

Related posts:

1. Goodbye Electron Hello Mastercard Prepaid Card – How To Avoid Booking Fees At Ryanair The cheap flights airline Ryanair introduced a £5 payment fee...
2. British Airways To Squeeze More Money From Passengers British Airways has always maintained an image of providing service...
3. What We Can Learn From The Ash Cloud About Cheap Travel Insurance The travel chaos caused by the ash cloud from the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

According to an excellent page about the Girobank at Wikipedia the Giro Bank was,”Established by the General Post Office, it was bought by Alliance & Leicester Group, which was subsequently acquired by the Spanish banking group Banco Santander.”

“The organisation chalked up notable firsts. It was the first bank designed with computerised operations in mind; the first bank in Europe to adopt OCR (optical character recognition) technology;[1] the first UK bank to offer free accounts to individuals; and the first bank in Europe to offer telephone banking, beating the much trumpeted First Direct service by several years. It is widely credited for shaking up the UK banking market, forcing competitors to innovate and respond to the needs of the mass market.”

A shame such a good business was sold off then. We had a widely available and successful bank operating at post offices around the country back in the 1960’s which was able to provide banking facilities for ordinary people in convenient locations and by post. If it had continued it might have benefitted the Post Office enough that we could have avoided the policy that caused several thousand post offices having to close. It would seem that it’s success was to prove it’s downfall and our elected scoundrels decided to sell it off in 1989.

We are well aware that we cannot trust any government with our assets. We saw the sell off of British Gas, British Airways, British Rail, Girobank and just about anything else that might have made a profit and benefited us all back in the 1980’s. We saw our unelected Prime Minister selling off our gold reserves some years ago and he certainly never asked me or any other voter if he should. Interestingly this bold move was at a point when the gold market was at something of a low and that same gold would be worth four times as much now and if we were consulted and considered selling it something we should do now it would be worth four times as much now. Apparently it would now be worth an extra 6 or 7 BILLION pounds. I remember the good old days when talking of Millions was pretty hard to grasp. Now we talk about a few billion here and a few billion there as though it is mere pocket money.

Our leader likes to suggest he is a man with his finger on the pulse in financial matters. Hmmm. I have seen some bad financial decisions in my time, and made quite a few myself, but that was a huge financial error that cost every man woman and child in the country £100 each.

Why is it that no government seems able to see that something that makes a profit would benefit the public for year after year, instead of one simple windfall benefit from selling off our assets. The other question is, of course, if they are our assets shouldn’t we be consulted about a possible sale of any of them?

One of the current targets for a potential sale is the Post Office and the reason given is that it is a loss making drain on resources. So why would anyone want to buy it? If some company would decide to buy the Post Office it would surely be done on the basis that they would be able to make a profit in the future.

Why is it that any government would consider themselves incapable of successfully running a business like the Post Office yet they maintain they are capable of running the country? Clearly the intention of selling the Post Office is proof enough that they are incapable of successfully running the coutry. This is not a party issue as the Tories are as eager to admit they are just as incapable of successfully running the Post Office and the country as Labour.

The other suggested sale has been the Dartford Crossing. How anyone could consider selling such a rip-off goldmine like the Dartford crossing is astonishing. It is money for nothing. It was always supposed to become a free crossing once the first tunnel was paid for from the cost of the tolls. It never did become free. They decided to open a second tunnel and delayed the free use because of the cost. Next they added a bridge which again delayed the free use and last year charges were increased. You only have to see the queues of traffic, caused by the toll booths, to see how much money is being made. Astonishing amounts of money being collected from motorists even though we were promised it would be free eventually and this ignores the cost to the country of the people wasting time in queues that are entirely caused by the toll booths.

Incidentally, there was a No10 online petition about the Dartford Crossing asking that the toll booths be removed to ease traffic congestion. The reply from the Prime Ministers office to that petition argued that it was necessary to have the toll booths to smooth traffic flow so there is no need for toll charges at all. Perhaps we can expect to see toll booths for pedestrians in Oxford Street at Xmas time to ease the flow of people during busy periods! It also contained lies about the number of lanes available to traffic, saying that there were fewer lanes available than elsewhere on the M25. (The crossing has 4 lanes heading North and Six lanes heading South) The M25 has mostly 3 lanes which is less than there are at the Dartford Crossing. Presumably they already had plans to sell off the crossing and a profitable company is likely to sell for more money. Incidentally, is it a mere coincidence that there was a 50% increase in the cost of using the tunnel/bridge a year or so ago? 50%? These people expect us to vote for them when they deceive and lie to us?

Anyway, I seem to have rather got off the point there. The idea of a post office based bank is a good one and is something to be applauded. Such a shame it has taken 13 years of government for them to decide to do this and the chances are that either a) Labour are not re-elected so it goes no further or, b) they are re-elected and then conveniently forget all about it.

There is also talk about encouraging children to save at the Post Office. More deja vu there. It used to be that children were encouraged to save and the post office savings account was the first place to start bing able to put a few pennies into a savings account. These days it seems that nobody wants small savers because there is not enough profit in them. Even the Governments own Premium Bonds require you to purchase a minimum of £100 worth.(It’s actually National Savings, did they sell that off too?)

So, yes. This is a very positive step in the right direction. We should all be encouraged to save for the future and if that means your child wants to deposit just £1.00 then they should be able and encouraged to do so. The Post Office would also, apparently, be able to offer 90% mortgages so you may in the future be, visiting your local Post Office and asking,  “Can I have ten first class stamps and a £250,000 mortgage please.”

My worry is that if it takes place and proves to be successful greed will overcome commonsense and it will be sold off. Actually, it just occured to me that this will make the Post Office much easier to privatise with a successful banking operation. The cynic in me wonders if that was the sole purpose of this idea and any benefits to customers are mere coincidence. I wish I were able to have more confidence in the honesty of politicians but it is hard to have any when all they do is spin the truth, mislead the electorate and attempt to damage their opposite numbers. Let us hope that a Post Office Bank has a long and successful future that benefits the taxpayer forever.

Related posts:

1. OFT Abandon Bank Charges Fairness Case There is disppointing news on bank penalty charges today. The...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In Feb 98 the bank rate was  7.25% average cc rates were 21.1% – Difference = 13.85

In Feb 2005 bank rate was 4.75% average cc rates were 15.2% -    Difference =  10.45

Feb 2010 bank rate is 0.5% and average credit card rates are 18.8% – Difference = 18.3%

The report shows that 2006 was the cheapest time to have debt on credit cards when compared to the official bank rate with a difference of 10.3%  but now, just a few years on, everything has changed.
The excuse given by the credit card suppliers is that they are having to manage a very significant number of defaults by customers but it seems that they bring a lot of that on themselves by making customers stick to the required repayment plans rather than allowing some flexibility to help their customers manage the repayments.

While they claim to be willing to help customers, they seem all too ready to turn over the debt to a debt collection company for pennies in the pound and arguably they are the cause of the losses they suffer because they are so eager to ditch the debt at any price. The majority of people do want to repay their debts but when times are hard and they find it difficult to keep up with the payments they previously easily managed they get little help from the credit card companies.
Raising interest rates on these debts does not make it any easier for these people to repay their debts. It actually makes it far less likely they will be able to pay. When your credit record starts to deteriorate like this everything becomes more expensive. Your costs rise and you have even less money available to repay debts.

If you are struggling to repay debts then it is likely your bank account will have a few items going unpaid in which case your bank will enthusiastically attempt to make your financial situation far worse by removing a couple of hundred pounds from your account every month before you even begin to try to pay your bills thanks to their clever people who come up with yet more interesting ways to justify taking your money from your bank account.

Note to self – Idea for a bumper sticker.  ‘Criminals do it with knives and guns, Bankers to it with pieces of paper.’  Might be a little long. Maybe shorten it to ‘Bankers have no morals’

Lessons must be learned from our experiences over the last couple of years and for credit card companies it must surely be that their business model was flawed. The idea that you can fight to lend money to people and go to any lengths to increase your customer numbers forgot about the fact that times change as do financial circumstances. Maybe that model made sense in 2000 to 2006 but what planning had been done for when times were bad. It’s not as though we had never had recessions before.

Perhaps they were too naive and they believed the then chancellor when he said, “No more Boom and Bust” They clearly imagined there was a gravy train that could be milked long into the future though there were plenty of less clever, less well paid and less experienced ordinary people who were saying the buy now and pay tomorrow culture could not survive much longer.

If credit card companies really do worry about defaults they need to do more to help their customers avoid financial ruin and find a way to repay their debts. While raising interest rates on customers whose credit rating is sliding probably makes lots of sense when you look at the figures in a plush head office in London, the reality is that it leads to devestated lives and defaulting customers out there in the real world.

Related posts:

1. Credit Card Consultation – Have Your Say Kevin Brennan, Minister for consumer affairs feels the balance between...
2. Proposed Changes To Credit Card Rules This week has seen the government introduce proposals to change...
3. Paying A Mortgage With A Credit Card Paying Mortgage With Credit Card A report was published yesterday...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.