Financial & Travel Musings

One of the handy things about the pre-paid currency cards is that you can use them as a savings account for your holidays and average out the exchange rate at the same time.

Thus, we’ve been putting £50 in the Post Office travel money card fairly regularly over the last few months with a view to using it to pay for our holiday in due course. Granted, I’m not getting the very best exchange rate at any given time doing this but what it does let me do is to pop £50 in and average out the exchange rate that I’m getting. That’s effectively taking the exchange rate risk out of the equation for me at very little additional cost.

Somewhat more economical on the exchange rate front would be FairFX which lets you put in small amounts too but I find that popping it into the Post Office is handier.

Popularity: 4% [?]

It seems like every week there are another batch of airport closures due to the Icelandic volcano.

It’s so common now that it’s hardly even mentioned on the news and it looks like the only way to know for sure whether your flight is on is to call the airport. Even then, the other week that didn’t even work as some airports listed as closed had flights during at least part of the day.

There neither seems to be an end in sight of this nor does there seem to be any move towards consistency in reporting what’s happening. If it were anything else, you’d have seen a website set up to collect together all the information but that hasn’t happened yet, probably because a) it continually looks like it might be over soon and b) nobody seems to have the full picture of closures.

The only clear certainty in all this is that it would be crazy to even think about any holiday this summer that involved flying anywhere.

Popularity: 8% [?]

We’re in the midst of selling our French property and planning major florida vacations as a celebration of the day we receive the cheque.

The only problem is that the sale is taking so darned long that I think the kids have given up hope of ever getting to Disneyworld. Not that it’s stopped them nagging us about it, of course!

Planning has even went so far as us getting one of those US$ prepaid cards for the initial expenses whilst we’re there. At the rate the sale is progressing though it’s likely to have expired before we get there

Popularity: 1% [?]