A Time of Magic » Finance

Jobs in healthcare when the economy is flat

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:00:57 +0000

When the economy isn’t doing too well it can pay to check out the healthcare job listings.

Whilst many are obviously specialist posts that you’re simply not going to be able to do without substantial amounts of training and education, there are a lot of non-health specific jobs that get listed on the healthcare job listings sites. Moreover, there are also quite a lot that don’t require massive amounts of training which is something worth considering if you’d like to add another skill-set to that which you already have.

Cuts there remain to come, but healthcare seems to be one of the areas where they’ll be felt that little bit less than elsewhere.

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Are all the airport security people fat?

admin — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 23:16:48 +0000

Wendy’s addicted to watching those airport shows though I think they’re running out of interesting angles if some of the recent ones are anything to go by.

The odd thing with most of the airport jobs is that the people doing a particular job seemed to have been specially selected to be bad at it in a lot of cases. I’m sure that the selection process didn’t choose them because they were that way but it would seem that the job changes you.

In one recent programme it would appear that they select all the airport security people to be fat for instance which somehow seems wrong…

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Peculiar economy, peculiar pricing policies

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:36:50 +0000

We’ve been keeping more of an eye on our spending than we normally would of late and it’s interesting to observe just how many changes to prices there have been in the shops lately.

Whilst I couldn’t claim to remember all the prices of everything there are a number of things that I’ve noticed moving in peculiar directions as the weeks have went by. Lucozade for instance has a seemingly endless series of different offers with six packs starting off at Â£2.99, going down to Â£2 in some places then back up to Â£2.99 and then to “2 for Â£5″ (ie Â£2.50 each). Obviously a case of the shop or supplier experimenting with the price to try and find what will make the most money for them but the problem is that it’s showing clearly that the higher prices are bringing in a profit so canny shoppers just wait ’til the price goes down.

Even more confusing is one of the milk drinks that the kids like. This comes in two places in the shop in bottles that are identical apart from a single word being added to the bottles in the fridges which seemingly is enough to add 30% to the price even though the contents of the other bottle are identical.

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Why look for a job these days?

admin — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 21:38:37 +0000

Hardly a day goes by without some family living on social security being pointed out as a bunch of layabouts because they’ve seemingly made a positive choice to live that way rather than to look for a job, but with the rules as they are, why would they look for a job?

Taking as a basis the so-called typical family of two adults, two kids they can easily get clear of Â£15,000 a year net, equivalent to a gross salary of over Â£21,000 and closer to Â£25,000 by the time you add in even basic housing benefits for an average area of the country. The problem is that all of the example families pulled out by the newspapers seem to be fairly unskilled therefore probably able to attract a maximum salary of around Â£12,000 thus it’s rather unlikely that they’d be able to get a job paying over twice that.

That’s just for the basic benefits and there are a lot more to be had once you’re getting one of the passport benefits like job seekers. It’s impossible to list them all but some examples are free school meals, payments towards school uniforms, reduced fees (often zero) on courses, reduced entry fees to some places and so on. Depending on your interests that could easily add several thousand pounds a year to the payments. And, of course, that’s for an average family in an average area of the country: each additional child adds about Â£5,000 to that gross salary and more expensive areas of the country can add substantially to the housing benefit available.

No job certainly looks like quite an attractive option these days.

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Merchant accounts vs personal accounts

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:41:14 +0000

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.

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Oddities of government finance for the regions

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:18:49 +0000

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.

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Valuing a house when it’s not a cookie-cutter one

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:10:45 +0000

We’re trying to sell a rather unique property at the moment.

That’s clearly more difficult in the current market than it would have been a few years ago and therefore the buyers are that little bit more cautious about it. Essentially they want to know what the property is really worth when previously they’d have taken more of a chance.

Thus, we find ourselves becoming more aware of what it’s really worth as opposed to what we’d like it to be worth. As it happens there isn’t a whole lot of difference in the two figures and we’ve been keeping such a close eye on it that when we got another valuation done by an estate agent to help one of the buyers our own figure was identical to the one that we’d quoted that buyer earlier (no, we didn’t influence the agent: the buyer arranged the agents visit and we never even spoke to them).

The problem is that this particular buyer had started from the premise that he could borrow X, that he’d need to spend Y on various renovations and that therefore he could only pay us X-Y. Unfortunately, that figure is well under what we could accept as even a rock bottom minimum and it turns out it about a third of what the valuation turned up. To say that he’s not a happy bunny is putting it mildly as he’d put quite a bit of time, effort and money into getting all kinds of experts out to assess what it would cost to makeover the property into what he wants and now that’s all been wasted.

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How come almost everything seems to be going down in price?

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:43:26 +0000

We all know that electronic things have been going down in price for a long time and that house prices have been going down for a year or two but what about everything else?

You might not think of books as something that would go down. After all, they need authors to write them and their salaries aren’t going down, plus they need seemingly perpetually increasing amounts of paper to print them on. Yet, whilst way back in 1981 the Encyclopaedia Britannica retailed for Â£600, you can buy the latest one (if you look around) for Â£450.

Houses might be dropping in price but surely house improvements would be more expensive? Well, we’re in the process of updating our kitchen and bathroom. Both are around the same price as the original cost some 30 years ago. And the new one will be much higher quality too.

It seems almost a case of looking around for things that aren’t decreasing in price.

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Is the mortgage market restarting at last?

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:07:44 +0000

One recent surprise was a whole host of “sold” signs in the local area that seemed to pop up over the course of just a few weeks.

That would be something of a surprise at any time to be honest. This isn’t an area known for really rapid house sales and these days you’d have expected that sales would go even slower. Well, to be fair, the sales did take quite a while as the signs have been up for months but to have so many “sold” signs going up in such a short time is quite surprising.

Of course, what remains to be seen is whether the signs will remain at “sold” or if they’ll go back to “for sale” which has happened fairly frequently over the past year. One wonders what terms the mortgage calculator will have turned up for the various purchasers. Somehow I suspect that there’ll be rather high deposits required and probably none too good interest rates.

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Strangely different banking practices

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:26:02 +0000

Although we often think of America as a close cousin in every way, there’s lots of little differences that you just don’t expect.

Take bank transfers for instance. In the UK it’s a simple matter to transfer money from A to B but it’s only simple because the UK banking scene consists largely of a handful of big banks which operate pretty much right across the country. That being the case, they’ve had the opportunity to make standards stick and to implement a modern banking system.

In America it’s quite different. There you’ll find thousands of banks often dealing only with a local community. Instead of having a handful of banks with hundreds of branches as in the UK, there you’ll find hundreds of banks with only a handful of branches.

This difference has led to a much more community based approach in some cases. Thus the check by phone facility that exists in America has absolutely no counterpart in the UK for the simple reason that community banking just doesn’t exist in the UK: nobody would trust a system quite like the check by phone mechanism!

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