Archive for the 'Finances' Category

MasterCard What Now?

Published on December 25, 2009 in Banks and Finances. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Well, surprise, surprise. It seems that the Clydesdale Bank shifting me from a Maestro card to a MasterCard Debit card does have some added advantage after all. It could be, without a hint of irony, the greatest single advantage ever in the history of banking. Yes friends it seems that a great swathe of online retailers don’t even have an OPTION for a MasterCard Debit card. A few, like Amazon, have got a MasterCard option to be sure, but does that option cover both credit and debit varieties, or only the credit ones? Some types of services are restricted specifically to debit cards. The National Lottery website won’t accept the card because it believes it’s a credit card, and their rules prevent people using credit cards on the site as party of their, very responsible, gambling policy. I’m not sure about Play.com right now because their site doesn’t have a drop down box to describe the card type. I guess I’ll just have to plug the card details in and hope for the best next time I try to order something.

Well I’m sure it’s an advantage somehow…

Chainring Kerching

Published on December 7, 2009 in Bike, Finances and Fitness. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

My bike is still out of action, and it’s starting to get me down. I know logically that we’re getting into the depth of winter and that I probably wouldn’t ride it that much if it was fully operational, but that doesn’t stop me illogically wanting to ride it anyway.

I’ve been reading reviews on various mountain bike websites, as well as trawling through the parts sections on Evans Cycles, Dales Cycles and the Edinburgh Bike Coop’s websites. From what I’ve read it seems that the old maxim holds true even for bike parts: “buy cheap, buy twice”. All three shops have an extensive collection of parts to suit every budget, but as I seem to have already been stung by what amounts to a fairly cheap FSA OEM crankset I’m not anxious to buy a budget set just for the sake of saving a few bucks.

I’ve just about settled on a Shimano M770 XT Hollowtech 2 Chainset which is at the upper end of the market, but not into the ridiculous money range. At the time of writing Evans are currently selling the OEM version for £127.99 and the original retail version for £164.99. As both versions include the bottom bracket and all the other required parts the only difference appears to be in the packaging.

As I said in my earlier post it’s not just the front chain rings that are a bit worse for wear. The rear cassette has suffered a bit of damage as well, either as a result of the front rings causing the chain to slip, or as a result of a damaged chain. Currently I’m considering the Shimano M770 XT Cassette which is an exact match for the M770 XT chainset that I mentioned above.  Again the cassette is available in an OEM version for £39.99 or a retail version for £56.99. I’ll admit that I haven’t put as much research into the cassettes as I have with the chainsets, but I can’t see there being too much to chose between them.

It goes without saying of course that any replacement cassette and chain ring will have to be accompanied by a new chain to match. To be honest there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference that I can see between the various chains, but the Shimano HG93 Chain at £17.99 on Evan’s site seems an OK choice to go with the M770 XT parts that I’ve spoken about.

At the moment these three parts will set me back £185.97 in total if I go for the OEM versions. Then it would be simply a matter of getting them attached to the bike and adjusted… Simple…

Christmastide Computing Concerns

Published on December 6, 2009 in Breakdowns, Computers, Finances, Technology, Technowhiiit and Whiiiit!?. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’ve got a horrible feeling that my computer is going to keel over very soon. At this very minute I can hear some kind of ungodly racket coming from one of the internal fans even as I type. I can’t make up my mind if it’s the graphics card, or something else. The graphics card going wonky would probably be one of my biggest fears as it’s only a year old and cost about two hundred quid. It’s also the most likely candidate as it’s currently very poorly sited inside the case as you can see from these pictures.

Puter01

Puter02

The airflow over it is very restricted by the fact that I was forced to position the hard disks right at the front of it. A problem caused by both the design of the case and the size of the GTX 260 itself. I’m not an expert on the airflow thing, but I think air is being drawn in from the front of the case, over the close packed hard disks and from there into the intake fan of the graphics card. So basically this monster card is breathing in air that’s already fairly hot.  Couple that with the dusty, half heartedly cleaned floor I’ve got around it I’m almost certain that the GTX’s fans are the ones crashing away.

Thing is it’s been fine through the summer so I don’t know why it’s started going nuts now that winter is here and the flat is colder than a penguin’s fridge on a cold Arctic night.

Hopefully this isn’t the start of some horrible new sequence of breakdowns as having the bike out of action is bad enough, but if the computer goes I’ll be left having to watch television for my amusement, and that’s a fate worse than death!

Amazing Rewards Inside

Published on November 19, 2009 in Banks and Finances. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Barclaycard seem to be getting pissed off. I’ve just got a letter today telling me that I’m a lucky man. My Graduate Barclaycard has now been upgraded to a wonderful new Barclaycard Cashback. I assume this is because I’ve not actually bought anything with my current card since 2006 and have just recently finished paying off the last of the outstanding balance. I suppose it’s my own fault for listening to people when they told me I should keep it in case of “emergencies”. If I’d gotten rid of the card in the first place

The letter is a big glossy mail shot written in a friendly and encouraging tone with details of all the amazing features of my new card. The top line is a blazing azure headline that reads “Good News – You’re Being Upgraded”.

First of all I get an amazing 1% cashback on the first £20,000 of purchases I make each year and 0.5% cashback after that.

Double cashback on contactless purchases.

They’ll also lower my purchase APR to 21.4% and give me 0% on any balance transfers that I make until September 2010 (3% fee of course).

They also gave me a £10 House of Fraser voucher…

So in very simple terms I’m to be highly excited by a card that rewards me with virtually nothing unless I spend a huge amount. Additionally I would have to instantly pay off all the balance as soon as the statement arrived or my diminutive cashback “reward” would instantly be dwarfed by the amount added on to my account in interest.

I think this upgraded card will be joining it’s pal in the drawer.

An Expensive Hobby

Published on November 17, 2009 in Computers, Finances, Gaming, The Tendering Process and Upgrades. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

I’m a greedy man I think as I’m constantly looking at the price of components on ebuyer.com with an eye on improving my PC. I’ve not got much spare cash right now, and with Christmas approaching I’ll need to set some aside for presents, but I’m still plotting and planning and dreaming of a massive upgrade. I know it’s only been about a year since the last time I carried out some upgrades, but I’m planning a more comprehensive overhall this time. The old dual core AMD Athlon that I’ve got is starting to act quite tired, and windows XP is slowly choking to death under the bloat of installed crap that I’ve never got round to removing.

I’ve even gone as far as going through all the review websites and checking out what would give me the best bang for my buck.  Tom’s Hardware and Tech Radar have been particularly helpful as ever. I’ve not gone overboard and went for the best of stuff, but I have tried to pick things that will last quite a long time and dramatically improve the current performance of my machine.

So far my plans are shaping up like this:

Intel Core i7 920 D0 – £214.87

ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 iX58 – £202.30

Antec 902 Nine Hundred Two Black ATX Case – £86.99

Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive x2 – £116.22

Corsair 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz XMS3 – £133.21

Grand Total: – £753.59

Unfortunately that’s far to steep for my current financial situation. In fact for that price I could more or less get the MacBook that I’m always humming and hawing about, or I could even buy a complete computer from Mesh or some of the other specialist gaming PC retailers. Advantages being that I would get the whole package with a warranty, and various other peripherals included in the price.

I’ve already got a copy of windows 7 professional that I bought, so it would be a simple matter to wipe all the preinstalled crap off a shop bought machine and set it up however the hell I like.

A Lesser Burden

Published on July 19, 2009 in Banks and Finances. 0 Comments

Well today marks the end of an era. After a lot of blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice I’ve finally cleared the entire outstanding balance on my Barclaycard. As we speak the last payment is making its electronic journey from my account to Barclays and I’ll at last be free of the indentured slavery of consumer debt.

I immensely regret having ever allowed myself to be talked into getting a credit card. I feel it’s done nothing but drain away my limited funds since the day and hour it first dropped through my letter box. I regret it, but the decision had to be made. When I first got the thing I was struggling along on my grant and student loan. I didn’t have much spare cash and I needed to pay the rent. I remember my flatmate telling me it was fine, I just had to use the cash advance from the card to pay the rent, and then pay the card back once I got my next grant or loan instalment. Seems simple doesn’t it? What he neglected to remind me was that his parents were FUCKING LOADED and paid off his credit card every month FOR HIM. I on the other hand suddenly found myself with a credit card, and not enough money to cover it and to pay for food, books and all the other things essential to university life.

As I was new to the idea of credit and magically invented money I made a lot of classic mistakes. I used it to get cash from ATMS, and spent years only paying the minimum payment amount which was nothing compared to the outstanding balance. Eventually I reached a point where I couldn’t use the card any more even if I had wanted to because to do so would keep taking me over my limit. I owed about £3,500 and it was round about that point that I resolved to be rid of the damn card forever.

That was about three years ago, and I’ve been slowly but surely paying, paying and thrice paying to get rid of the damn thing at the rate of a hundred bucks a month. That might not sound like much, but I’m also paying out a hundred bucks to Cahoot for the flexible loan that I took out with them when I walked out of my job at Abbey National after a fortnight. I don’t know many people that could soak up the loss of two hundred quid a month and not feel some kind of pain from it.

It’s done now, but I keep wondering what I could have done with all the cash I’ve poured down the drain over the last ten years or so.

Let me out officer I promise I’ve learned my lesson.

Das Kredit Krunch

Published on May 1, 2009 in Finances, Jabber, Media, News and People Be Fools. 0 Comments

I’m starting to develop an abiding hatred for the phrase “Credit Crunch“. I’m not denying that the world has suffered an extensive and damaging financial situation in the last few months. I think it’s clear that something went very wrong with the financial system and a lot of innocent (and not so innocent) people have suffered as a result.

I am however annoyed that the so called Credit Crunch has become a global bogeyman. I’ve repeatedly heard it invoked whenever something bad has to happen in the world of business. The Financial Crisis was caused by irresponsible lending, and corporate greed. It wasn’t a supernatural force, and it certainly wasn’t an accident that the markets ended up in the mess they’re in.

It really makes my blood boil to hear the pithy phrase Credit Crunch being thrown into a conversation as though it were Satan himself. I’ve head it blamed for everything from a shop lacking fivers for change to the closure of a famously mismanaged local factory.

To help everyone out I’ve drawn up a list of ten situations that the evil Credit Crunch bogyman was not responsible for:

The Credit Crunch did not impregnate your teenage daughter
The Credit Crunch did not steal your car
The Credit Crunch did not sneak into your house and inject you with cellulite
The Credit Crunch did not pump your maw
The Credit Crunch did not have a one night stand with your twin sister
The Credit Crunch did not make you gay
The Credit Crunch did not cut you up on the motorway
The Credit Crunch did not eat the last jam donut

Last and most importantly of all:

The Credit Crunch did not make you take out that unnecessary credit
The Credit Crunch did not make you mismanage your company

Oh and if I’m wrong, and the Credit Crunch is an anthropomorphic representation of an abstract concept, I suggest they get Samuel L Jackson to play him in the inevitable movie adaptation.

The Deadly iTendering Process

Published on December 30, 2008 in Finances, Shopping and The Tendering Process. 2 Comments

In spite of, or maybe because of, my wage slave status I’ve been giving a lot of consideration to buying a Macbook on hire purchase. It would be pure indulgence of course as I don’t need it. It doesn’t really do anything that a windows laptop couldn’t and it’s expensive for the specifications, but damn it, it’s pretty as hell.

The only reason I’m giving any serious credence to the idea is because I’ve discovered that employees of The Work get a variable discount at the online apple store. According to the discount page I can get the smallest of new aluminium body Macbooks for £872.85 instead of the normal £929.00 retail price. That’s about 8% of a saving over the retail. At the other end of the spectrum I could choose to get the highest rated of the Macbook Pro’s for £1754.90 instead of the retail price of £1908.00 which again is an 8% saving on the price. It’s not much of a discount to be fair, but any discount at all is better than a kick in the balls from Gavin Hastings.

Now the Apple Store has a wee info box that claims I could own the Aluminium MacBook I mentioned for as little as £23.84 a month over 36 months. That means in the long run it would cost about £858.24 for a machine that I could get for £872.85 with the corporate discount rate. This seems a fairly questionable to me though.

Why would Apple make a loss on the hire purchase option when everyone else in the world is milking it for all it’s worth?  As a cynical Ayrshireman I went looking for the small print and found the fatal line hidden halfway down the page: “Typical APR of 15.7%”. In my previous experience only Bill Gates himself would be given the typical APR on a loan, but I’ll use it in my calculations as I’ve no idea what rate they would offer me.

First of all I’d like to say that APR is a slippery customer. It’s not as simple as adding 3×15.7% onto the amount of the loan and having a cup of tea. Thankfully the good people at Microsoft included a formula in Excel that calculates the final payable amount for you.

If you’re interested the formula in question is called PMT() and you use it with the following arguments:

=PMT(Monthly_Interest_Rate, Number_Of_Monthly_Repayments, Loan_Amount, End_Value, Payments_Due)

I’ve paraphrased the argument names a bit to make them clearer. To make use of the formula you need to divide the APR by 12 to get the monthly rate and plug this into Monthly_Interest_Rate. The rest are fairly straightforward: Number_Of_Monthly_Repayments is the number of months that the loan will run for. Loan_Amount is the original amount you’re borrowing; End_Value should normally be zero as it’s the goal you’re shooting for. Payments due is optional and sets if the payments are due at the beginning or end of the loan period. This formula will give you the approximate monthly repayments that you’ll really be paying. These figures might vary a bit from what the lender decides due to other factors, but it serves as a good guide as to what the repayments and total are going to be.

What about the results though? Well according to my excel based calculations my actual monthly repayments, assuming an APR of 15.7% and a loan amount of only £872.85, would be £30.56 which is £6.72 a month more than the Apple Store info box claims. A quick multiplication by 36 for the number of months of the loan gives a final total cost of £1,100.08 for my brand spanking new Macbook. That’s a difference of £227.23 or roughly 20.5% extra on top of the original cost.

I still want it though. These figures change nothing. This is just the infamous TENDERING PROCESS in action.

EDIT – If you’re curious the top of the line Macbook Pro at £1754.90 would have repayments of £61.44 with a total £2,211.75 payable by the end of the 36 months.

Hauns Aff Ma PIE!

Published on December 29, 2008 in Banks and Finances. 1 Comment

I was doing a bit of financial investigation today with my online banking system and worked out a distressing fact about my money. I won’t get into the actual figures but in 2008 almost a quarter of the money that I’ve spent has gone on paying off my credit cards and my infamous Cahoot flexible loan. In true office worker style I’ve rigged up a pie chart that gives a basic breakdown of my finances for the year.

The coding is fairly straightforward. Rent is the rent on my flat which is by far the biggest chunk Messages cover’s food etc. and bills covers the electricity, council tax, TV license, phone bills and broadband etc. Cash covers the times I’ve been to an ATM and withdrawn money. The debt heading covers the infernal credit cards and loan. Extras are basically anything that isn’t needed for day to day survival. It’s disheartening to see that even after a year of making a concerted effort to diminish the damn thing it’s still swallowing a sizable chunk of my income. Hopefully 2009 will be the year that shrinks this to a far more acceptable size.

The New Cashflow Rage

Published on December 3, 2008 in Finances, Internet, Shopping and Technowhiiit. 1 Comment

I don’t often swear on this blog. In fact I’ve made a conscious effort to keep things nice and polite in the main, but on this very special occasion I’d like to say this:

FUCK YOU MASTERCARD SECURECODE.
SERIOUSLY FUCK YOU, EAT SHIT AND DIE.
And Relax.

You might have gathered that I’ve added Mastercard’s SecureCode to my Christmas naughty list. You might also wonder why, and like any cantankerous pissed off old man I’ll tell you.

Now to set the scene: I have a credit card with Barclaycard. I’m not proud of that fact, but needs must when you’re a poor student. (Much to my disappointment it turns out that money really doesn’t grow on trees you see.) I bank with the Clydesdale Bank for reasons that are too convoluted and Ayrshire-ish to go into here.

Now I like to pay back as much as I can afford on the Barclaycard. As a result I’ve never seen the need to set up a direct debit with them, but I’ve always religiously paid by Switch/Maestro over the internet at the start of every month. Maybe not the best setup I suppose, but I’ve never yet forgotten to pay or had any problems with their site, well, until tonight that is. You see tonight I logged in as normal, and was in the process of paying off a chunk of my outstanding balance when I ran into a hurdle: Mastercard Securecode.

For anyone one not familiar with these things Securecode and it’s contemporary Verified by Visa are both touted as anti-fraud devices. Sort of a Chip and Pin for online shopping is how they describe themselves. The Register has raised a few doubts about these things in the past. Particularly how easy it is for scammers to reset the password with only minimal information (information they would need to use your account in the first place). The system does seem to provide a convenient way for the banks to quickly wash their hands of liability when it comes to unauthorised transactions on your account.

It turns out that both the Clydesdale Bank and Barclaycard are members of this system. The Barclaycard promptly pops up a form during the payment process demanding that I enter my Securecode to proceed with the transaction. Now I’ve seen Securecode once before on the H Samuel’s website about this time last year and I thought it was a one off anomaly akin to the other party online payment solutions you occasionally come across like Netbanx. I jumped through the hoops then because H Samuel’s website was the only place selling the thing I wanted to get my Mom for Christmas. One year later though I was left scratching my head wondering what the hell I had used as the Securecode. I clicked on the “forgotten your secure code” button and then the magic started. The system refused to accept my card number claiming that it wasn’t valid. Bullshit. I’d just used it that day to pay for some Christmas presents, and I’d triple checked it as I was typing it just on the off chance that I was going blind and/or mental. Naturally as any enraged idiot would I then proceeded to try and guess the code. Three wrong guesses later I was informed that my Securecode account for that card had been locked and I would have to check on the Clydedale Bank site to release it. So I checked the Clydesdale Bank site only to find that the halfwits didn’t have a single, solitary piece of information about what to do when a card gets locked out. I tried hard to articulate my displeasure at this discovery, but it mainly came out as “WHIIIITTT??! SUCK MA BAWS YOU BASTARDS.” Their sole piece of advice was to re-register the card with the Securecode service. Naturally when I tried the site just laughed in my face and told me that “The details supplied are invalid.”

The Barclaycard site won’t accept payment without the Securecode so I’m left in the position of being unable to pay the balance online. So now instead of a nice, simple couple of clicks I’m going to have to scramble about looking for statements and account details to pay over the phone.

OK I’ll admit that my problem might not be Mastercard’s fault. It could well be something to do with the way that the Clydesdale bank has set up their part of the process, but I can almost guarantee that I’ll be pushed from pillar to post while trying to sort it out. I’ll also freely admit that I’ve probably dug myself an even deeper hole by charging in and locking the account with my half arsed guesses, but I remain UNREPENTANT.

As an aside: McDowall has been buying stuff in cash of late, and I assumed it was because he’d joined the tinfoil hat brigade. After this debacle I think the man himself might have been displaying his usual degree of wily clairvoyance in abandoning out so called flexible friends.