A Time of Magic

I’m sure that most people assume that shops basically have the same kinds of account that they do themselves albeit with larger throughput.

However, that’s not generally the case. Yes, they do have relatively normal bank accounts but for a whole host of reasons they can often accumulate countless other accounts with their suppliers and in particular for payment processing. To sell merchant account is very much a specialism as the requirements of businesses can vary considerably even when they are apparently similar.

Thus, for example, you can find that two quite similar hotels will operate their credit card processing in wildly different ways. Most will continue to use their normal bank but these days that’s not necessary nor desirable as there are outfits that can do it much cheaper and with more efficiency than a normal bank could.

One of the increasing problems for the UK government is the fact that large chunks of what were formerly nationwide financial decisions have been devolved to the regional governments which make for some peculiarities that are most noticeable in these difficult times.

Thus we have the national government saying that they will ring-fence health and, largely, education spending. A fine aim for sure, but both of those budgets are devolved to the regional governments which causes problems because those governments are financed by what’s called the block grant – essentially a big cheque to cover all of their bills.

The effect of this is that those block grants are what will be reduced (by anything from 25% to 40%) and it will be up to the regional governments to distribute those reductions amongst the areas within their responsibility. Taking Northern Ireland as an example we find that health and education take up around 60% of the total budget so if they are ringfenced by the regional government and the cut were 40% then all other departments would need to be closed down which is hardly a runner. Even at 25% that would mean a 60% cut in the other departments. Thus ringfencing health and education is hardly going to be possible, no matter how desirable it might be in principle.

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect some extremely difficult decisions from the regional governments in the coming months.

Getting disability insurance is something that must seem like a complete nightmare and an expensive one at that.

Unfortunately it’s not something that you can just do without as you’re probably much more likely to need to call on that insurance at some point. Naturally, that increased risk is something that the insurance companies don’t like too much which in turn means that it’s often worthwhile to go through a specialist insurance broker who can take account of your own condition and will know which insurance companies are likely to look more favourably on it in terms of charging.