Financial & Travel Musings

When we’re gazing into the future that our kids may have we’re usually thinking of college then perhaps university and wondering if they’ll really still want to be a train driver or fireman at that point.

More prosaicly there’s all kinds of little illnesses that they’ll encounter along the way and, of course, the whole teenager period where they’ll be hunting high and low for natural acne treatments to avoid the appearance of lunar craters all over their face.

Whilst tight planning is likely to simply lead to rebellion at some point, a loose plan does need to be made. These days you can’t take it even for granted that they’ll learn to read in school so it’s worthwhile having a backup for that should schooling not work out for them. Likewise it seems sure that university fees will have long since headed into the sky in a few decades time so you need a financial plan for that too.

So, don’t just gaze hopefully into the future: do something about it to make the best become a reality for your kids.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I’ve a nice 500MB memory card for my little baby computer that really shows its age when I say that it cost about $150 when I bought it yet that was only about five years ago.

Today of course we’re talking GB when we talk about flash memory and it’s getting to be so cheap that the suppliers usually start at several GB for even the cheapest cards these days. In fact, it’s now at the point where it would be considerably cheaper to just buy new cards than it ever was to buy the equivalent number of photographs on a roll of film.

However, as always with technology, we’re starting to get into incompatible standards so you need to have a good read at what your camera can handle before you decide to buy a massive memory card for it. If it’s more than a year or two old then your upper limit is 2GB and may be as low as 1GB. Anything beyond that and you need one that supports SDHC as all the latest high capacity SD cards conform to that.

But then, do you really need it anyway? My 10MP Nikon D40X can hold several hundred photos on a 2GB card even at the highest resolution settings. That’s the equivalent of around 10 36 exposure films. I never took more than that on even the longest holiday so although the camera can take SDHC cards I don’t see me needing any of them anytime soon.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Whilst I’m sure that many of us think of a lot of things for children, life insurance for kids generally doesn’t figure in those thoughts.

And yet, it should really. For a start, many products coming under the heading of “life insurance” are really savings vehicles and those designed for children are no different. Well, they’re different in one key area and that’s the length of time that the policies are generally written for. Typically an adult life insurance savings vehicle has a term of 10 years but the childrens’ ones are usually designed to mature when they do ie at age 18.

That extra time makes a big difference in the performance of some of these products. By and large the first couple of years of any savings style life insurance product goes largely in charges but once that’s in the past, they’re generally pretty cheap forms of investment and you’ve got a whole lot of time to play with when it’s a policy for a child.

The other aspect that I’m sure we’d all rather not think about is that insurance element. Much as many of us put such issues to the back of our minds it’s something that’s best not left neglected as, sadly, it does happen.

Popularity: 14% [?]