Shades of Grey

Someone who I know slightly through work is feeling a bit hard done by financially. Most of his shares were in Northern Rock (and various other turkeys) and his savings are with Icesave. He has been on the phone rather a lot today to the FSA and the words “Chocolate Teapot” spring to mind- He will probably get refunded up to £50,000 provided that he qualifies to do so but they can’t tell him the timescales. Besides which, the Bank aren’t actually insolvent, they have just slammed the virtual doors shut.

Now I have worked in Insurance before for my sins and in many ways Insurance is a high class version of William Hills- it is a sort of bet, but the outcomes are the other way round, i.e. winning is not losing. As with the turf, the bookie always wins unless they get the odds wrong. (This is why actuaries are so highly paid).

The other thing about insurance is that to contain costs, customer validation is generally carried out at the point of a claim, rather than at the point of policy issue. In laymans terms, this is often perceived as the bastards are looking for reasons to wriggle out of it.

Now, how competent are we to expect the FSA to be? I imagine that they will sort it out in the end but in the meantime, hundreds of thousands of people will find their cashflow disrupted somewhat. The words fund of last resort rings bells with me that they aren’t going to be sending the cheques out by the end of the day.

So, how can me batten down the hatches and weather the storm? Well I imagine the smart people with independent wealth will have invested in Krugerrands and a safety deposit box (or perhaps steel window bars and assorted weaponry) but what is the average Joe to do?

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days and have a few suggestions, I’m not a financial adviser of course, so they are worth what you have paid for them.

• You could bank hop to one that is looking less shaky, or maybe hope to be in the first wave of collapses in particularly dodgy ones, but opening a bank account these days is rather a lot of jumping through hoops because of the money laundering regulations and they are bound to cock it up anyway. Perhaps it is best to sight tight with the devil you know for your main checking account.
• Similarly with mortgages, the offers are scarce so sit tight, you’ll only have to pay silly fees to move anyway.
• Get your credit card debt down, preferably to zero. Even if you pay off your balance every month, don’t expect a payment holiday just because you can’t temporarily access your money.
• Use your debit card in preference to credit cards- but keep enough of a balance to compensate for this.
• Don’t cut up your credit cards- you might need them in a crisis if your liquidity dries up.
• Move a chunk of savings to another banking group as a financial buffer and if you are lucky enough to have more than £50k (£100k for joint finances) then don’t fall into the trap of having the money in the same banking group.
• Find out what your household insurance covers you for on cash in the house- and get that much cash in the house. Don’t put it under the mattress or in a pretend tin of beans in the cupboard.
• If you have an offset mortgage of £100k and savings of £50k, that £50k is not protected by the FSCS Scheme. Instead, if the bank goes to the wall, you find yourself in the rather good position of now only having a £50k mortgage instead, so you will be able to pay it off much more quickly. On the down side though, you haven’t got any money. At all. Your current and savings account balances are at zero. Ouch.
• Start buying slightly more long life foodstuffs (tinned food & rice).
• Resist the temptation to buy new books, CDs and magazines- you probably have a load of them you never got round to reading or listening to anyway. Now is a good time to tighten your belt.
• Get a small generator- they are quite cheap from the likes of ALDI. If the leccy goes off (and it is probably going to go off this winter anyway) you probably need power to keep the central heating boiler working. There WILL be power cuts in the future, I am sure of it.
• Get an explosion-safe jerry can for petrol.
• If you are into negative equity and you are max-ed out on your cards, be prepared to kiss your lifestyle goodbye.
• Get yourself a copy of Farnham’s Freehold, lots of ideas of how to survive in a crisis.
• Don’t believe any cak about more regulation being needed, it is regulation that got us into this mess, along with successive Governments who have eroded the Gold Standard and forced socialistic policies onto the markets.
• Take stock about how the 1983 Labour Party Manifesto is being implemented in adversity and Vote Libertarian at the next election, or better still, join the Libertarian Party. Even in these cash strapped times, it is an excellent investment of your Tenner.

(This post also appears at the UK Libertarian Party blog)

Morley has a new parking scheme. Our biggest car park (Queensway) gets busy at times and teeters on the edge of fullness on Saturdays. All parking in Morley is free, apart from one small car park belonging to a shop that has a pay & display scheme with refunds for Customers.

So, our burghers decided to improve things. Did they look at removing yellow lines on some little used side streets in order to create more parking spaces? No. They decided to introduce three hour limits on the lower half of the Queensway car park, the busiest bit because it is nearest the shops.

How did they decide to implement the three hour scheme? By introducing parking discs perhaps, or simply getting the wardens to keep track of number plates the same way they do on the on-street parking? No. They put in two pay ticket machines, on free dispense. So, electricity and paper consumables are required. (It looks like thermal paper). How is the scheme going? Here is a Facebook report from PJ-

Just got back from Morley. Morrison car park pretty full, but got parked easily, near the top.

The bottom bit was jam-packed and, being nosy, I had a look at a few windscreens in the hope of seeing one of these newfangled tickets.

I was sorely disappointed. Didn’t see one. Zilch.

In fact, I nearly got one out of the machine just to see what they looked like.

Good thing our lords & masters have kindly granted us a few weeks reprieve from prosecution, otherwise the wardens would be running out of tickets by now.

It is not very well signed, in my humble opinion, and I can easily imagine locals not realising about it, let alone our out-of-town visitors.

I really, really look forward to the first penalties being issued. Maybe there could be a little civic tea party at the town hall for the lucky recipients to mark the occasion, followed by a public proclamation of pardon from the town hall steps.

There is much discussion on Facebook (account required), not much of it supportive.

I went there at about 9am yesterday morning, to get a sunday paper from the Garage (ASDA doesn’t open until ten). I was the only car there, but I took a ticket just to be on the safe side, as the rules appear to apply at all times. My ticket was number 498 which strikes me as a low number after four working days.

Meanwhile, Morrisons Garage will be temporarily closing to install new petrol pumps that are “better for the environment”.

Now as carbon based fuels are regarded by the watermelons as the spawn of beelzebub, this raises a question.

What is an environmentally friendly petrol pump? One that dispenses Marmite instead?

(I assume it means the pumping mechanism is very efficient and the electronics have low energy power save features). 

If we were playing word association (football) and you mentioned chicken wire, I’d probably reply Bob’s Country Bunker.

That is because that is where the Blues Brothers performed Rawhide and they were bemused to find that the stage was behind chicken wire. It was for their own protection, as the bottles soon started to fly.

Today, I bought my very first roll from Handyman in Morley. It isn’t called checken wire at all, it is wire netting. This was to apply to the lower level of our wrought iron garden gates as Karen is fed up with unwanted visitors.

Basically we are finding fairly large Poohs on the lawn. Now I don’t think it is any of my former colleagues from the Town Council, as lets face it, they’d probably put them through the letter box. I also famously made comments in the Press about not trusting some of us to sit on a toilet the right way round…

We reckon it is a pooch, one that likes sweetcorn.

So, I’ve cable tied on two lengths or wire. Does anyone want a roll of chicken wire, only partially used?

By the way, here is Rawhide, Blues Brothers Style.

There are suggestions emerging from Brussels that Bloggers should have some form of kite mark or seal of approval. See this telegraph article then various comments here, here and here.

“We do not need to know the exact identity of bloggers. We need some credentials, a quality mark, a certain disclosure of who is writing and why. We need this to be able to trust and rely on the source,” she said.

Why is it that politicians always think that unregulated requires more laws?

Anyway, I’ve been working on some ideas for a Shades of Grey Quality Mark. I have some basic ideas and they just need tidying up and I’ve found some images on the web as a suitable starting point. The working themes are shown below…

Now that David is in year 6 (the top year of primary education) we will shortly have to indicate to Education Leeds which secondary school we would like David to go to. There is a form to fill in, or it can be done online.

The trouble is that expressing a preference only works if the schools have places. There are a number of priorities applied to the admission based on special educational needs, siblings at the same school and then how close you are physically. The system is further distorted by applicants from over the Leeds City County boundary who bizarrely take preference over Leeds children. As Morley borders Wakefield and Kirklees it is the awkward position of all three high schools being heavily oversubscribed.

I had the pleasure of interviewing all of the Morley High School Head Teachers at length a couple of years ago  so have a bit of a grasp of how the schools are run. The nearest school is Morley High (originally Morley Grammar) which went through a bad patch earlier in the Century but has been turned around by a “Super-Head” who describes the school ethos as “earthy”. Woodkirk High had the better reputation (& results) and it isn’t much further away. Bruntcliffe High lies a fair walk past Morley High and an unlikely choice on that basis as it apparently gets the highest number of over-the-border applicants so the catchment area is rather small.

All three schools have specialisms: Science, Technology and Business & Enterprise, However, on enquiring as to whether this was of benefit should David show abilities in these areas, it turns out that this has bugger all to do with the pupils as there is no selective intake based on ability or potential. If you want that, you have to go to a Grammar School &/or a fee paying private school. There aren’t any State Grammars in Leeds, although there is one in Heckmondyke (which still has the catchment area & non-selective quotas).

There are open evenings coming up at the schools over the next few weeks before the deadline for returning the form on October 17th. However, it appears that David’s teacher has been telling the class some disinformation about how they have to get their parents to return the form it as soon as possible or they won’t get a place. This has made him a bit anxious so we have had words with the school about this.

We want to see both of the schools, ask some searching questions of the staff and let David partake in the decision for what preference to express- even if it is something of a pointless exercise as the preference doesn’t count for much.