Financial & Travel Musings

Although many would argue that if Fort Knox accumulates a mountain of gold, then that’s clearly the way to go but it rarely is.

Yes, you can find that gold will appreciate quite substantially from time to time, particuarly when things appear bleak in other financial areas. But, when things pick up again, you’re just left with a pretty lump of metal which doesn’t pay you any interest or dividends.

Shares are obviously risky so if you’re looking for something that’s safe, then you need to avoid them and anything that’s based on them too which means that bonds are out too. Even the banks aren’t really 100% safe. If they’re large enough, the government will usually feel obliged to step in and bail them out, but do you really want to assume that your bank qualifies as being “large enough”?

You might think that I’ve eliminated everything, but there is one totally safe way to hold your money and it’s so simple that most people overlook it. All you need to do is to put your money in the government’s bank.

In practice, few governments allow you to bank directly with their central bank but the central bank normally has a number of offshoots with which you can deposit money and which also have that 100% guarantee. For example, in the UK you can use National Savings (from instant access savings through to fixed term investments) and in America you can buy Treasury bills (a fixed term investment).

What you’ll usually find is that these investments pay a little less than their equivalent as put out by normal banks. For example, at the time of writing, you can get 4.5% from an instant access account for a high street account but only 3.45% from National Savings. That 1% difference is effectively the cost of the 100% guarantee for your money; many depositors with Northern Rock would have been more than happy to pay it.

Popularity: 11% [?]

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With Easter just about upon us, we’ve been doing a final pre-deluge check around the place and have been finding endless little things that need fixed.

In many cases, they can’t be fixed though because our guests have obviously had a go at fixing one or two themselves without asking us. So far, the most expensive is a rather nice looking cut glass lampshade which we’ve just thrown out this morning because for some unknown reason a previous guest had decided to try and remove it to replace the lightbulb but, since they didn’t have a screwdriver to loosen a few screws, decided to simply yank at it until the glass broke and then leave it just dangling there.

Next up for this afternoon is the shutter that a guest didn’t bother to close when it was banging with the wind and left it until it snapped in two and a toilet seat that somehow they managed to snap off the hinges.

Then there’s the “wastage” that becomes evident when you get around to counting the various items that should be there. That got so bad with the teaspoons that we had to buy a complete new set last year because so many of them had been pinched. We don’t have a lot of chairs outside over the winter but even so there’s one that was stolen quite recently by a guest.

On the computer front, it’s quite amazing how many times that people will try to “improve” the setup of the computer that we make available for guests. One lot “improved” it so much that it took us several weeks to get it working again.

Still, at least the place will be working perfectly soon… just in time for the Easter contingent!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Since online photos are generally only around, say, 300 pixels by 200 ie 60,000 pixels, you might think that it doesn’t really matter what camera you choose for taking photos intended exclusively for online use.

In theory, that might be correct but in reality it’s a theory that doesn’t hold much water.

First off, if you take photos of fast-moving objects such as in a car race you’ll soon find that a compact digital is very hard to use because there’s quite a delay between pressing the button and the photo actually being taken. Try the same thing with a digital SLR and you’ll find that the photo is taken almost instantly. The difference is very noticeable and makes taking images of cars in races and similar very easy vs virtually impossible.

The larger image size lets you crop out parts of the image without reducing the quality as displayed or printed. To be fair, the increasing resolution of even quite cheap cameras these days sometimes overtakes that of low end SLRs so this point is less of an issue than it was even last year and probably by next year both types of camera will have similar resolution.

There’s also the issue of accessories that are available for SLRs which you simply can’t get for compact cameras. The single thing that’ll make the most noticeable difference to your photos is probably the ability to use bounce flash on an SLR which eliminates red-eye but goes way beyond that.

Finally, even if the compact camera has the same resultion as the SLR, the larger lens on the SLR makes a considerable difference. So much so, that it’s quite noticeable even in images shrunk down for the Internet. Consider the two images here. The larger flash has obviously made quite a difference and the flat feel of the photo taken with the compact is replaced with a more 3D quality. However, look at the detail in the two photos: the door on the SLR photo is much clearer.

What about the cost though? Well, these days the increasing sophistication of the compacts is taking their price upwards whilst the SLRs are generally getting cheaper. Net effect is that, at the moment, you’re looking at paying around 50% more for an SLR vs a good compact.

The biggest plus point of the compacts is that they are small and therefore, in some cases, you may find that it’s much more practical for you to take photos on a regular basis with one as you’ll clearly not be carrying around an SLR everywhere.

Popularity: 70% [?]