Unexpected.

My mate, Alan had his 40th birthday party the other night.  The venue was his local church, and he is an involved member of the church, the building is very modern and has room for a party, that seemed reasonable, although I was having the same thoughts probably as any reader is.

With preconceptions set, I went along, arriving late owing to a babysitter mix up and was welcomed, quite a few people I knew, of all age groups including Alan’s parents and so on and the band was starting up. Alan is a drummer, plays in the church band and is pretty good. The guitarists from the church band are excellent as well.

They started with The Unforgiven, by Metallica, went through numbers by Nirvana, Evanescence (the wife of one of the clerics doing vocals) and various other numbers! Fantastic, this was right up my street, and I loved the fact that the audience were so varied whereas the music wasn’t compromising even a little bit.

Then Johnny joined in – Johnny is Alans 12 year old son and they played numbers by Linkin Park and Bon Jovi and few others.

The we got to the speaches…Johnny carried the main speach – he’s 12, did I say that already, and he’s making what is best described as a ‘Best Man’s’ speach – jokes etc, you know the thing. Then his wife sang a Celine Dion song – not my cup of tea, but very well done and then Alan had to make his speach – well, I’ve never seen him crack up before, but he was very much on the edge now.

Anyway, it turns out that he has some lifetime ambitions – to play rock music to an audience, to play rock music to his friends, to play rock music with his son…he achieved all of those tonight.

Very few people could have carried off this evening – Alan and his family did.

Sea levels rising…

There are loads of articles about sea levels rising, most quite passionate and some predicting doomsday within really quite short timescales.

This article by New Scientist while quite alarming, seems to be alot more measured and informative. It also predicts the submersion of Portsmouth and Hull – sad if you’re a fan of The Housemartins, I guess.

Anyway, here it is  http://tinyurl.com/nebb5e

Index Linked savings certificates

There are two things we need tolook at here, one is ‘Inflation’, and the other is ’savings’

Savings

Where savings are concerned, people sit in different camps.

One camp says ‘Buy Stocks and Shares’ – on the basis they have a track record of out performing deposit accounts.

The other, more cautious camp, doesn’t like the risk and accepts the underperformance as the the cost of security.

Inflation

2 camps here as well, one saying ‘All this money that the govt are throwing into the economy is bound to cause high inflation’ and the other believing that it won’t, it will be just enough to reinvigorate the economy.

Whereas we pretty much know our feelings towards putting savings into a world where it’s possible to lose money, nobody knows how inflation is going to react to ‘Quantititive Easing’.

What are these Certificates?

Although many of us have forgotten, you can save money at the Post Office. One of the products they have is a kind of savings account where the interest tracks at 1% above the Retail Price Index (RPI) for 3 or 5 years. I’ll tell you a bit about the RPI in a minute.

Now, if you fall into the camp where you suspect inflation is going to be high in the future, then you’ll already be thinking these look attractive.

They are deposits,  so there is no gamble on “values going up as well as down”, but there is a gamble is on the level of interest you may recieve.

Brief Technical details

The interest is Tax Free – so, if you’ve used your ISA allowances already this year, it’s another haven from tax. There is a maximum investment of £15,000 per person. There isn’t a passbook, like a building society would issue, you are issued with a certificate – the certificates are either 3 or 5 years and pay interest once a year.

If you were investing, say £10,000 you may want to consider buying say 10 x £1000 certificates, rather than 1 £10,000 certificate, just in case you need access to some of your cash.

RPI – here’s what you need to know.

There are two measures of inflation – the CPI – the Consumer Prices Index. This is the rate the Bank of England are told to keep at 2% and usually on the news, whenever they say CPI, they say straight after “The Governments Preferred measure of inflation”.

Simplistically, CPI is calculated by taking a standard list of goods and seeing how the prices have changed over the past year.

The other rate is less talked about, but it is pretty important is RPI. It is usually higher than CPI because, while it is calculated in exactly the same way -  by taking a standard list of goods – that list of goods includes Mortgage interest and Energy prices.

Your eyebrows rose then didn’t they – energy prices really low, mortgage interest really low – that’s why the RPI is below zero at the moment, becuase oil came down from $140 a barrel to $40 and mortgage interest from 5.5% to 0.5%.

By early next year the RPI will have risen again – becuase these drops will have fallen out of the rolling 12 month period.

Many people think that when interest rates start rising again – say 12 – 18 months seems to be the popular opinion they will rise fast. Well, although CPI won’t be affected, RPI will be, maybe by quite alot.

At this stage, no one knows the actual answer – there is a possible low RPI scenario as we go into the future so it’s not a dead cert.

But to my mind, it’s worth a thought.

TV choices in the downturn – Free Sky?

I have been looking into TV options for my new house. Because I have had Sky before, they seem reluctant to give me any good deal on the new house, as they would a new customer.

That narks me – I am a new customer, my ex is still running the Sky on the old house. Anyway, it has prompted me to look into the choices.

So, while you are paying attention, how would you like Sky for free? Well, if you have Sky already, you can ask them for FreeSat from Sky For £20, they’ll send you a card that allows access to 240 odd channels – 220 are a bit rubbish though, so don’t be fooled by the numbers. However, after this, you don’t need to pay a Sky monthly subscription (watch out for your contract with Sky, you may be committed if you’ve recently upgraded or something). Since you need a Sky box and sky dish, this isn’t really an option for people without sky anyway although I gather ebay may help here.

Next, we have Freeview – this is free, as long as you have a standard arial on your roof – it should just happen with no particular effort, the same as when  you tune for terrestrial channels. You can either access Freeview with a TV that has built in freeview, or a set top box costs between £20 and £66 is the dearest I’ve spotted. You get about 40 channels but the make no guarantees about Hi Definition TV. The 40 channels have better choices than Sky’s 240 IMO, so don’t just look at the numbers.

The new kid on the block is FreeSat – this is a joint venture between ITV and BBC and IMO has Sky worried. It has some HD broadcasts and is free each month. It has a decent array of Channels although tellingly, Sky haven’t joined in. You need a set top box – £125 – £300, or some tele’s have it built in now, and depending on if you want the equivilant of Sky+ It had a decent selection of channels. It picks up it’s signals from the same Satellite that Sky uses, so you will need a satellite dish, but likely as not your old sky one will be pointing to the right place.

Finally, since pay per month Sky has most of the USA shows – CSI etc – you may want to consider Top Up TV.

This seems to be like a Freeview box on steroids. It has a hard drive and recieves freeview. But you can also subscribe £9.99pm and they’ll download a load of TV shows onto the harddrive of the freeview box for you to watch, like a recorded program on Sky+, so you don’t watch them live, you watch a recording stored on the hard drive.

Obviously there is Virgin too – I don’t live in a Virgin area so I know nothing about it. I’m assuming that people who do have access to it, know all about it…

Hope that’s of interest…