Financial & Travel Musings

The price of weddings seems on a never ending spiral upwards with not only inflation to contend with but increasing requirements for little extras around the main business of the wedding too.

So, as well as the wedding invitations, you now need to send “save the date” cards so that people can pencil the big event into their diaries even further in advance than they used to. Those bits of admin mean that it’s not uncommon to need a wedding planner to pull all the various bits and pieces together so that the day is a success.

Even for the main items it’s becoming more of a hassle with the need to co-ordinate the bridesmaid dresses with the rest of the stylistic features of the wedding.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The problem wth social security benefits is that people generally just assume that they’re entitled to a whole bunch of things which, on the whole, they won’t be able to get or at least not in quite the way that they expect to get them.

For instance, you probably “know” that the social security system is an integrated one. It isn’t. Each benefit that you are entitled to is almost always administered completely separately from every other one. Thus you won’t get a single social security payment but will normally get a number of separate payments on different dates if you’re entitled to multiple benefits.

Moreover, when you claim, you’ll generally find that the knowledge about benefits in general is quite limited. If you claim unemployment benefit those people won’t know much about the additional benefits that you can claim for your children. For example, if you are entitled to income based job seekers allowance, you’ll also be entitled to a whole range of benefits including child benefit, child tax credits (really a benefit), free school meals, a uniform allowance for the children and housing benefit. In addition to this you are entitled to other things such as support for education and training costs and things like reduced cost admission to museums.

Don’t assume that these entitlements will go on forever though as some have stringent requirements applied to them.

Popularity: 4% [?]

When you’re British you basically assume that America is just a large island off the coast of Ireland and one that is clearly very similar to Britain.

Of course, it’s similar in terms of language and, largely, in terms of general culture too. But it isn’t exactly the same, nor is it just like one would consider a frontier off the coast of Scotland.

Most notably different is sales of things like barska scopes. Gun shops are a whole retailing category which basically doesn’t exist in the UK and the “right to bear arms” is something that is profoundly alien.

On the other side of the coin, travel agents barely exist in America in comparison to the vast numbers spread across the British countryside.

Popularity: 3% [?]