As always, the way to get this is via an online retailer like discountfragrance-online.co.uk who strip away all the expensive demonstrators and fancy chairs and provide you with the same perfume that you could buy in the fancy shops but at a considerably more sensible price.

Of course, in reality you don’t save that much money on such things but what you end up with is a much higher quality of perfume for your money. The only downside is that you can’t make it a last minute thing as you need to allow for a few days in the post.

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1. Isn’t it amazing at how differently we view a product when the price drops?

Individual house sales are a fairly rare event for most people so we’re still seeing people putting houses on the market at prices based on a purchase price from a few years ago which, in many cases, was a higher price than the current market will support. That houses won’t sell at these prices is obvious but in many cases the owners simply can’t afford to sell them at the current prices so they add to the collection of “for sale” signs which in turn make things seem a little bit worse as their numbers build. As an example of how far away from the current prices these can be take the example of a house a few hundred yards from me which was bought at the peak of the market at around £300,000 whereas identical houses are now selling (slowly) for around £170,000. Had those people bought on an 80% mortgage they’d need house prices to rise another 40% from their current level just to cover the mortgage.

However, even when houses are priced at an appropriate level that still doesn’t mean that they’ll sell quickly as once a buyer is found and the house is taken off the market it’s quite likely to get the “for sale” sign back as buyers frequently can’t get mortgages: in one local case it took three buyers before reaching one who could get a mortgage.

Sadly all this means that people will be stuck in their houses potentially for decades if they can’t simply write off what could be a substantial loss.

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However, clearly not all young drivers are bad drivers. But if you’re one of the good ones, your problem up to now has been proving it. That’s where technology has finally come in for young drivers car insurance in the form of what’s essentially a consumer version of the device installed in trucks to keep track of the driving habits of the professional drivers.

What this does is to record your driving so it’ll keep track of the length of your journies, your speed, how fast you accelerate and brake, etc. From this the insurance company doesn’t need to assume anything about your driving as they can see exactly how you drive which, hopefully, will lead to lower insurance rates for those young drivers who are good drivers.

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Sure, we’ve been used to that happening on all kinds of electrical and electronic items with computers almost dropping to the fashion item price range (hence the arrival of colour choice recently of course). However, who’d have thought of that very same thing happening to something like eyeglasses?

That’s a product that’s historically been seen as involving highly trained opticians, expensive offices and skilled technicians which overall seemed very much like a recipe for high prices as far as you could see. Except that online retailers like ZunniOptical are changing all that with prices at the bottom end of the range (which don’t look like el cheapo glasses by any means) coming in for pretty much loose change.

Clearly when a product drops into that “loose change” price range from previously having sat well in the “fairly serious money” price range then there’s going to be big changes in how it’s perceived and used. For one thing, the concept of having a single pair of glasses purely because it wouldn’t be worthwhile to have more than one pair doesn’t hold any more. Thus, even at the lowest price there is heaps of choice and the opportunity to match your glasses to your outfit in a way that wouldn’t have been viable before.

I wonder what’ll be the next product that this will happen to?

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That sounds fine and it may well save you some money but the problem with the UK home insurance market is that insurance companies that do content insurance have a list of stuff that counts as being “content” and a different list of stuff that counts as being “buildings”. Unfortunately, these lists aren’t completely identical between the various companies so you can find some things listed as “content” by one company that will appear on the “buildings” list of another company. That discrepancy is why it’s essential to keep both policies with the same company.

Most of the time it won’t matter. After all, clearly the bricks are part of the building and clearly the furniture is part of the content. What about something like an outdoor BBQ that incorporated a seat made from bricks? It might seem a somewhat contrived example but there are lots of similar grey areas that insurance companies create through these different lists.

Don’t forget too that if, even if you’re lucky enough to have any problem that arises completely covered by two different companies, that means that you’re looking at two separate insurance excess payments which these days can mean anything up to £1000 or so.

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So to get corporate insurance you will almost always need to go to a specialist insurance broker which obviously means looking at firms relatively close by your business premises.

However, it’s worse than that in that, for example, to shop insurance Glasgow, if you’re in a relatively specialised market niche you’d need to look for, say, insurance for contractors Glasgow. Well, “worse” in the sense that you may need to be more specific in your requirements of an insurance broker but if that broker is more familiar in dealing with your type of business you’ll generally save a lot of hassle in explaining what you do and won’t miss out on essential insurance that’s specific to your industry group. Not only that but the specialists will know more about the types of policy available to your industry niche too which can save quite substantial amounts of money.

Incidently, don’t be tempted to try to do the cheapo route of just using one of the personal insurance comparison sites as they usually don’t list essential items of business insurance and you could find yourself with an expensive problem should it turn out that you don’t have some legally required insurance or there’s an exemption in the insurance that you bought which means that you’re not covered for doing something that you do quite regularly. These things usually only become apparent after you need to claim on a policy which is obviously a little late in the day.

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For a start there’s the different legal system to consider. Even if you’re European and buying or selling in another European country you can still find that, although illegal, the local authorities will retain some of the proceeds of a sale in case it turns out that you owe them any taxes. It’s worth pointing out to the legal person dealing with your sale that they are legally required to treat you as though you were a national of the country and that applied even if you fully intend to take the proceeds abroad afterwards so long as it’s to another European country.

Obviously with a property investment you can be talking in terms of quite substantial amounts of money and if you’re going to be changing currencies then it’s worthwhile looking into your options to reduce the costs of exchanging the money to the other currency and also of reducing the risk to you of there being a substantial move in the exchange rate. For example, this year the pound/euro rate has moved from around 1.10 to around 1.20. Ten cents doesn’t sound like much but if you’re looking at a typical property of around the EUR 300,000 mark that’s EUR 30,000 of a difference which is enough to cover legal fees with change or think of it as the swimming pool that you quite fancied.

How do you reduce these charges and risk? If you go to your bank as most people do you are likely to be hit with the maximum charge possible although the charge can be even higher if you just use the local legal people to send you the proceeds as they’ll add charges on top of that. The best way is to go to one of the specialist money brokers who can shave 5% or more off the charges that the banks apply and can also arrange to fix the rate you’ll get months in advance which eliminates the uncertainty in the amount that you will ultimately receive. Aside from the charges from the rate fix, there are no downsides as if the exchange rate moves in your favour you can let the fix lapse and exchange the money at the current rate.

On non-financial matters don’t neglect the time delays inherent in overseas moves generally. Not only does the money take longer to arrive (unless you just take it as a suitcase full of cash which is quite legal though may raise a few eyebrows), but it’s obviously going to take longer for the removal truck to move your stuff from A to B. There aren’t any formalities required in moving your own stuff around Europe although expect checks for illegal immigrants at the ports and be sure that the lorry doors are secured with a padlock (most aren’t) to avoid a few questions along the lines of the “have you packed the case yourself” familiar to air travellers.

It’s best to plan the move more carefully than you would for a normal domestic move as you’ll appreciate from the above that there are a lot more places that complications can arise.

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Sometimes the biggest surprise is in terms of back taxes. Although you’d think that these can’t be much, it’s surprising just how large a bill you can get from this quarter. For instance, often seemingly small omissions can amount to quite serious amounts of cash owed if they’re over a number of years. This tax debt can even reach such levels that you need to look into the options of paying it off in installments which at least could reduce the payments to more manageable amounts.

On the other side of the coin people can also find that there are quite substantial tax reliefs which they’ve not claimed. You might think that if you’ve an accountant that this just can’t happen to you but, in most cases, the accountant doesn’t get out to actually see what you’re getting up to and you could be pleasantly surprised if they’ve completely overlooked an ongoing tax relief. Just as in the case of underpayments, missing out on relatively small amounts of tax relief can add up to a sizeable chunk of cash when counted over a few years.

Whether it’s over or under payments that affect you, it’s best to do something about them rather than taking the head in the sand approach that many people adopt when thinking about taxes.

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Typically most people will move their money into cash savings in times like these and put those cash savings in a local savings institution on the basis that they know and trust the people in the branch. However, that’s a fatal error to make. Sure, you can trust the people in your local bank or building society branch with your cash but the problem is that they aren’t the people who’ll be investing that cash.

That’s how come Northern Rock created such a stir last year: it was very much trusted locally and indeed was well thought of generally too for that matter. However, what felled it was the way in which the financial wizards at HQ invested the money and pulled in more money to fund mortgages.

In fact, the safest place at the moment is one that’s commonly overlooked. It’s National Savings in the UK. That’s part of HM Treasury and it’s the one UK financial instution that can’t go bankrupt because they’re the people that create the money in the first place. No, interest rates with them aren’t as high as with other places but then interest rates aren’t that great at the moment anywhere and these days it’s safety that you should be looking towards.

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The particular difficult with accountants is that there can frequently be tie-in, no-competition and no conflict of interest terms in their employment contract. So, it’s not quite so easy to move jobs or to find a new accountancy job even in normal times as it is with “normal” jobs and, of course, these are far from normal times so it’s that much more difficult these days.

That said, if you’re searching for, say, “accountant jobs Edinburgh” you will find jobs around with some of those at quite surprisingly high levels. What you will see though, courtesy of the contract restrictions above and, of course, non-disclosure that there’s very little meat to the job descriptions and you’ll usually need to formally contact the employment agency to find out more should you be attracted to one of those on offer. In many ways that’s something of a nuisance but unfortunately it’s something that isn’t easily avoided.

So, if you fancy being a qualified accountant in Edinburgh there are definitely possibilities, just allow for needing to contact the agency rather than relying on information on the website listings.

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