5338124's BLOG

Its been a little crazy in the stock markets of the world over the last 10 days or so. Much of this is almost certainly due to the rapidly rising price of oil. It must be great being a Saudi Prince right now...

Prices of shares have been tumbling and investment and pension funds MUST have started to see major drops in their balance sheets. All in all, not a great thing for the average worker / employee / shareholder / retiree. Is that almost all of us???

Oil price increases are, of course, being matched by rising fuel costs generally, increasing inflation in food prices and likely interest rate hikes. The European central bank just moved rates up a notch for something like 350 million people!

After all those good times and good years, it is most definately time to focus on household budgets.

With that in mind, I found this pafe about budgeting. It was written with people in debt in mind, but the principles are the same for sure:

http://www.debtmanagementresources.com/debt-manag......

I know that most of my posts are related to personal finance or economics, but I thought I'd post something that is interesting to me personally...

I'm based in Gloucestershire, England and as a hobby, I like to go to salsa classes. I haven't been going to salsa for all that long, maybe 6/8 months so far. I wouldn't say I'm good yet, but I am getting better!

I found this link - which I liked - and is related to salsa classes in the Cheltenham area, so I thought I'd post it here. I hope that you like it.

Best wishes.

http://www.squidoo.com/cheltenhamsalsa

Hi everyone,

I found something in yesterdays Sunday Times that really got to me, so I thought I'd drop a little note here about it.

The article, tiny as it was, discussed a survey which the Financial Services Authority has conducted. It seems that almost half of the companies they questioned has no information security training for staff. Isn't that a disgrace?

These days, to be able to deal with a financial services company, an individual needs to fill out forms to prove they are not a criminal or money launderer. The questions relate to all sorts of topics and fulfill the 'KYC' or Know Your Client requirements which are requested by law.

And yet it seems that once this info is passed over, almost anything could happen to it. Bearing in mind the scale of identity theft in the UK over recent years, this is very poor from these companies.

It makes you wonder whether they care about their customers at all...

Who am I kidding???

To read more about ID fraud in......

Hey everyone,

I hope that anyone who reads this - and I know you are out there - is well and things are fine for you as you are reading this.

This is just a random post about job things... I have been applying for jobs here in the UK recently. I look at online jobs sites mostly. The positions are advertised by recruitment consultants.

Is it just me or are they virtually all useless??? I spent much of Friday phoning these firms to get updates about my online applications. These firms are - according to the site T&C - meant to contact the applicant. Do they?

What do you think... take a guess...

Mostly, they can't find the application. Some don't even look. One firm told me that the firewall of their website does not allow applications from this particular site - but they still advertise. Amazing!!

Talk about banging a head against a wall.

If you happen to be reading this and are a recruitment person, I'm sorry. Not very sorry, just a little. But blimey......

I'm in the UK at the moment. We have gale force winds and have had on and off for a couple of days.

Apparently, there are gusts of up to 85 mph. On the news this morning they mentioned that the strongest winds ever recorded in the UK were at 112 mph - so this is very strong by our standards... I appreciate that other parts of the world get far worse than this.

Hopefully, there will be no fatalities and things will pass relatively safely. But I quite like the fact that from time to time the planet reminds us who really is in charge and of the immense power of nature. Oddly, I find it a little reassuring.

Hoping that everyone reading this is safe,

Stuart