Financial & Travel Musings

To be honest I sort-of expected that glasses would be one of those things that would continually get more expensive. After all, there seems to be a whole lot of manual labour involved in getting them.

However, discount prescription glasses are available not only online but in the high street too. To give you some idea of just how much the prices have dropped, consider that my Mum’s nice, but not designer, glasses from 15 years or so back cost £150. Even designer glasses come for half that these days. Gone too are the cheapo NHS children’s styles and in their place are freebie glasses for the kids but in quite modern designs.

The prices have dropped so much that I even picked up a pair for myself for those days when I can’t be bothered with the contact lenses (which, surprisingly, aren’t any cheaper): all of £10!

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The problem with clearing out your house and garage is that you end up throwing out a whole heap of things that you’ll almost certainly need very soon afterwards but which you’ve not used for years.

Take clamps for instance or rather different sized ones. There will be a size or perhaps a small number of sizes which you use quite regularly but others which you used once for a job many years ago and figure that you’ll never ever use them again so they get dumped. Likewise for those screws for that long finished cabinet that you’re “never” gonna use again along with a whole host of other stuff.

Of course, the snag is that if you do keep all the stuff, there’s no chance whatsoever of you finding it when you actually do need it!

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The problem with life insurance policies is that they generally run for a very long time indeed.

Consider my Dad who died a couple of years ago. He had policies dating back to the 1930s that we know of and probably a number of others that we don’t know of.

Although life insurance is one of those “good things” that you know you should have, the snag is that having such policies means a commitment to pay them for a rather long time and to keep the original policy documents just as long. I’m sure there are loads of people out there who have a number of long since forgotten about policies as over such a long time you’ve moved house a few times and the insurance company itself has probably been taken over a few times as well.

Is it worthwhile spending time on tracking them down? Well, it depends. Most of the 1930s era policies were written in the days when one assumed that one’s children would die and moreover in a time when money was worth more. Typically, “penny policies” are commonly found and even after such a long time they’re not worth more than a couple of hundred pounds. Not money you’d want to throw away obviously but not worth losing sleep over either.

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