Financial & Travel Musings

I find myself in the unexpected position of just having passed the final course and picking up my modern languages degree (a phrase I’d never expected to be using!).

That in turn means that there’s a graduation to go to next September in Versailles. Wendy reckons that my “graduation suit” a) won’t fit and b) would be incredibly dated even if it did fit. Therefore ’tis time to consider a tuxedo or at least a new suit.

Actually, it’s time to consider a whole bunch of things. First up is whether or not to accept the degree funnily enough. Since I was never expecting to get a degree when I started out to “learn a bit of French” I wasn’t too bothered about the marks as I went along but now find that had one course mark been just a little higher I’d have had a better classification of degree. It turns out that I can change that by doing just one more course (an English grammar one) if I get a reasonably high mark in it and I’ve been mulling that possibility over for the last few weeks since I picked up the result.

Assuming that I do accept the degree (pretty likely as I’ve no particular interest in the course I’d need to do to change the classification), I’ve then to do stuff like book the ceremony, book the transport to it, book the hotel and finally to book the gowns and photographer. Or, I could just skip the ceremony and get the certificate in the post (can’t see me doing that though).

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After much prevaricating, I finally settled on the child development course for the coming year.

Why? Well, for a start I’ve two little guys who are 4 and 6 at the moment and who’ll have moved on somewhat were I to have waiting ’til the date I’d originally pencilled in for this course some two years from now. Having said that, the course covers the period right from early childhood up until they’ll be looking for the best acne treatment ten or so years from now.

I’m still not totally convinced that it’s a good move in that it’s a full credit course and we’re planning on moving countries twice over the coming year so it’ll be a busy enough one before adding in this course. Still, if I’d thought about what was going to come up each year over the previous five years I’d never have found myself with a nice new BA (Hons) Modern Languages at the moment…

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No, really, it is. Think back to how it was before you could buy auto insurance online…

First, you had to find somewhere that did car insurance. A lot of the time that meant that most of us just went back to the place we’d got it before and took whatever quote they offered us. If you’d been unlucky enough to get your insurance from the dealer there was the additional hassle of avoiding the car sales people on the way in too.

Even if you’d gone the extra mile and chosen a broker from the yellow pages, there was still the hassle of high pressure sales tactics which seems to go hand in hand both insurance sales. Chances are then that you ended up paying for all kinds of little extras which you really didn’t need and even if you didn’t, the pressure meant that you probably didn’t try more than one broker so didn’t get the best price.

Nowadays, we all have the luxury of shopping for it online so no sales people get to pressure us into buying all those little extras that we never really needed and moreover, the number of companies that online brokers check is generally greater than those that normal ones ever did so we get better prices on the basic policy too.

So, yes, it is wonderful.

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