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.

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.

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.

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 £600, you can buy the latest one (if you look around) for £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.

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.

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!

These days you can find a gift card just about everywhere from all the major retailers through to some quite small shops and that’s before you even consider the likes of phone cards. So many that I’m sure that just about everyone has received one at some time in their lives and, in case you’re wondering, there are collectors of the things too.

One big downside is that you can usually only use the card in the outlet that issues them which is more than a notional problem as people are finding out at the moment since the cards issued by retailers that have gone bankrupt can’t generally be used.

However, what can be worthwhile is a specific travel medical insurance policy. Depending on where you live, you might think that your normal medical insurance will cover you and that’s true but only up to a point. That particular point is usually repatriation which is a major league expense in some cases. Even on fairly short-haul flights within Europe you can be looking at thousands by the time you add in things like medical care during the flight, specialised equipment to be taken with you and, of course, you’re not going to be able to use a discount airline, are you?

Those not living in America also have to consider the potential expense of American medical care which tends to be a special extension to most medical insurance policies and is unlikely to be an option for most normal domestic policies. Even where it is an option you can find that the cover on offer is pitifully small in comparison to the bills that you could find yourself getting.

So, no for a general travel insurance policy, definitely yes for a travel medical insurance one.

Just a few weeks ago the Halifax/Bank of Scotland group was coming out and saying that they were perfectly fine and that the right issue that they had made them seriously secure. Unfortunately this particular piece of financial reporting was somewhat less than truthful. For one thing only 8% of the rights issue had been taken up so they’d a LOT less money in the kitty than they’d wanted and just yesterday the announcement came that they were merging with LloydsTSB.

Actually, that “merging” was an emergency takeover being rushed through by the government before they formally had to declare the Halifax bankrupt.

In this particular case, it’s something of a more natural merger than it might first appear. LloydsTSB itself was a merger from some years back of Lloyds Bank and the TSB which was effectively a mutual savings bank so the range of savings products is quite similar to that of the Halifax and it could be a reasonably smooth merger for the customers.

For example, car insurance works by calculating the odds that you’ll have an accident and how much it will cost to fix your car and whatever you’ve hit with it. That’s why even a car that cost peanuts to fix would still cost a reasonable amount to insure: after all, you could write-off a Rolls-Royce in an accident.

Somewhat more morbidly, the life insurance industry takes a view on when you’re going to die and sets the premiums accordingly as does the pension industry. Fortunately for them, these two are usually owned by the same companies in that as the life expectancy goes up the cost of life insurance goes down but the cost of pensions goes up which eases the impact for these companies.