Financial & Travel Musings

Whilst the welfare state was a laudable aim back in the 1940s, trying to support those most in need when they fell sick or lost their job, that aim of support in time of need seems to have been lost in recent years.

The problem is that originally the idea was that people would obviously want to get back into work (and be able to) and wouldn’t want to remain dependent on benefits. That view clearly isn’t held by a number of people these days and these people can take advantage of the lack of limits on the help available. For example, take a typical family of two adults, two children who have become unemployed. Very roughly their entitlement would equate to £60 for the adults and £40 each for the children (neglecting, for the moment, any potential housing benefit etc.). That’s a total of £120 a week or around £6000 a year. Actually, it would be more as there’s child benefit of £35 a week so the total in basic income benefits is about £155 a week, £700 a month, £8000 a year (equivalent to a gross salary of around £12,000). Not a massive income for sure but, potentially, one that the family might live on as, of course, there would be assistance with housing costs, free school meals, and a few others.

However, consider instead a family with 10 children. Each child adds £55 a week so that’s £600/week, £2600/month or £32000 per year. Bearing in mind that the benefits are tax-free this equates to a salary of around £50,000. Even though I’m quite highly qualified, I would find it difficult to get that level of salary.

Now, I accept that people with large families don’t necessarily have them to pick up massive benefit payments but even if they don’t, surely there should be some kind of limit in terms of a maximum benefit payment regardless of other circumstances? If not, it would appear that the best plan would be to pop out kids on a regular basis: it can’t be right that the benefit system seems to be actively encouraging that.

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With the economy being in the doldrums at the moment a lot of people are in a position to look at the qualifications with a view to improving them.

One of the problems in doing that is that you really don’t want to be starting off on a major new qualification and then have to abandon it when you get that job you were hoping for. However, all is not lost as there are lots of accredited online degrees out there at the moment.

Don’t think that you need to limit yourself to also-ran universities either. Many of the big names offer a range of online courses these days in all sorts of fields and at various levels.

The good point about all of these is that should you manage to land that ideal job “too soon” you can continue on with your self-improvement programme.

Popularity: 1% [?]

One of the problems that we all have these days is that basic qualifications just aren’t enough to get us into the various schools that we’d like to go to.

Instead, what we have are the likes of LSAT prep courses which are designed to get you over the hurdles in the form of aptitude tests hat the specialist schools now place in front of us seemingly at every stage. Do they work though? Well, yes, to a point. What they will do beyond you looking at sample LSAT tests on your own is briefing as to what is being looked for in each type of question and that’s often far from obvious.

What they won’t do is to do anything like double your score. Thanks to the work that the schools put into developing these tests, it’s largely impossible to significantly increase your score. However, that’s not always necessary. Think about the simple case where, say, 50% is a pass, 49% is a fail and you’re consistently getting something like 46 or 47. You don’t need to double your score: you just need to add a few percentage points. That’s the case for a surprisingly large number of people sometimes.

The other reason why it’s worth looking into is simply because everyone else is doing it. The overall effect of that is that the schools adjust the pass mark upwards to take account of this which in turn means that we all need to up our game.

Popularity: 1% [?]