Sorry for my lack of posts recently, I've been busy keeping Mrs. Soul Man entertained during her stay which has been fun if kinda draining. Anyway, she jetted off back to Detroit a couple of days ago so I'm feeling a bit lonely right now. Don't get me wrong, I've made a lot of great friends since I've been in London but having my lady over for a couple of weeks made me realize how much I was missing Detroit; since she went back I've really missed having a familiar face from home around.

Still, I'm not one to dwell on such maudlin thoughts and I've resolved to head back to the good old motor city for a few days, maybe next month if I can get away from work. The big obstacle, as ever, is the lack of dollar - entertaining Mrs. Soul Man aint cheap and as I've already noted trying to save money in London seems close to impossible.

I've already started scouting out cheap flights and in the meantime I'll just have to live the life of a particularly frugal hermit. Unfortunately this probably means sitting around at home a lot which is where my new hobby comes in - Internet Bingo!

Don't judge me but I've really got into bingo lately, it's pretty straightforward and I don't kid myself that there's any strategy involved, it's just a fun way to while away an hour or so and the prize money is really impressive - at 10 every weeknight Mecca online bingo have 'Mecca Mayhem' with a £2000 jackpot - it can get pretty exciting! Which reminds me, its 9.50 now….

Here’s a question for my US readership: How many of you have heard of Amy Winehouse? I ask this because living in London she’s pretty much impossible to escape. I know she won a Grammy the other week (the British press loved that) but I’m out of touch with what’s going on over the pond culturally so I have no idea if even a fraction of the mind numbingly over the top media hyperbole that follows her every action over here exists stateside.

If, as I suspect, the US press has yet to get quite as rabidly excited over the ‘troubled” celebrity singer let me fill you in: She’s a singer by profession but this is very much of secondary importance next to her thrillingly tumultuous private life. Barely a day goes by when I’m not confronted by another paparazzi shot of her stumbling around looking various degrees of wasted and disheveled – picture Olive Oil (Popey’s lady not the cooking ingredient) after a night on crack.

I find this fixation on self-destructive celebrities pretty tasteless to be honest; I guess Amy’s a bit like Britney in the sense that her troubled life is being lived in the public eye like a particularly traumatic soap opera. The thing that’s most depressing is that so many people want to read about this stuff, I guess that’s the classic defense of intrusive tabloid journalism – it wouldn’t happen if there wasn’t a demand for it. 

For the record I think her music’s actually pretty good and she’s clearly a genuinely talented singer, the funny thing is that the dubious fame her tabloid friendly antics has brought her has probably given her music career a considerable boost.

Well, it’s been an eventful few days; last week Mrs. Soul Man came over from Detroit to stay for a couple of weeks which on its own was kinda exciting – this is the first time she’s been over to visit me so it’s been fun giving her the guided tour of London – its’ actually nice to experience the city afresh with someone who’s never been here before.

I took her round all the usual tourist hotspots: Buckingham Palace, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, Tate Modern etc and in a moment of madness decided that the perfect, not to mention pretty romantic, way to see some of England’s green and pleasant land would be on a hot air balloon ride - I managed to get a champagne balloon ride flying over Kent online (who knew Asda do hot air balloon rides).

 Now, this is an undeniably lovely idea and Mrs. Soul Man was thrilled at the prospect, the reason I call my impulsive decision to book the ride a ‘moment of madness’ is that I have pretty bad vertigo! Seriously, I get pretty freaked out looking out of my first floor window so the prospect of being suspended in a small basket 2000 feet in the air started to play on my mind a bit.

So anyway the big day arrived and, after a troubled night, I was seriously starting to doubt whether I could possibly go through with it. Mrs. Soul Man can be quite persuasive though and, sure enough, I found myself clambering into a glorified picnic hamper at some ungodly hour of the morning and standing, rigid with fear, as far from the sides as possible as the balloon eerily began its slow ascent. 

I guess you’re all probably expecting that after the initial terror I ended up really enjoying it; well, sorry to be predictable but that was exactly the way it went – Once I actually summoned up the balls to peer over the side and got used to the whole situation it really did turn out to be a great experience – I can thoroughly recommend it and I have to say I feel pretty good about having confronted the whole vertigo thing.

Hello people, first of all I must apologize - it’s been a while. My only excuse is that things have been crazy busy of late; work and travel have monopolized my time and I really haven’t had a chance to collect my thoughts let alone write them down.

So, what’s been going on in The Soul Man’s life recently? Well, having seen a frankly irresistible offer on the aforementioned Travelzoo newsletter - man, that thing is dangerous; every time I get it I end up thinking something like “y’know at that price how can I possible ignore this chance to visit Croatia” – I grabbed a couple of ludicrously cheap flights to Budapest, booked two nights in a dirt cheap but perfectly pleasant hostel (if you’re looking for hostels I wholeheartedly recommend hostelbookers.com as a first port of call) and headed off for Hungary three days later.

All very impulsive I know but hell I want to pack as much travel into my time in Europe as I can so why not seize the day! Anyways, I’m glad I went; my knowledge of Budapest was limited to say the least but it turned out to be a great city – lots of wonderful architecture and a general sense of weathered grandeur. It’s the sort of place that mixes lavish opulence with abject squalor, my sort of town. Having got used to obscenely inflated London prices it also made a nice change to be able to go out for the night without having to apply for an overdraft extension.

Is travel insurance really worth it?

Where was I with my travel plans? I think we’d established that I’m going to Barcelona, I’ve started looking for flights to Spain in May, but I’m keen to incorporate a second leg perhaps somewhere else in that part of the world – any suggestions?

The prospect of an impending sojourn to sunnier climes has inspired me to address the issue of travel insurance in my next thrilling finance post, specifically the issue of whether it’s really worth bothering with.

It may seem kinda reckless to responsible travelers like you and I but I was interested to read the other day that as many as 35% of holidaymakers admit to not always taking out travel insurance. That means one in three of us are traveling without any form of cover, with strikes me as somewhat worrying. I’m by no means a safety conscious pessimist and I’m all for embracing an adventurous approach to travel but whatever your vacation involves, even if it’s lounging on a beach, not taking out any form of cover strikes me as a bit of a gamble.

Considering you can pick up a week’s comprehensive travel insurance in Europe for as little as £11 (from Go Travel Insurance) it also represents pretty good value; that small investment entitles you to £5million in emergency medical expenses, £2million in personal liability up to £20,000 in personal accident benefit – not bad for the money.

I’ve gone for annual travel insurance, an option that is perhaps overlooked by a lot of people who could make a decent saving with it. Given that standard annual cover is available for less than £39.63 (in Europe, from AA Travel Insurance) anything more than a couple of trips abroad over the course of a year would justify buying an annual policy. Because I intend to pack as much travel as I can afford into my time in England this should work out as a pretty great deal.

As I mentioned in my first post I might angle my ramblings towards financial advice occasionally, it’s what I used to do for a living and who knows it might actually be of use to someone. I wrote about current accounts a couple of days back so I’ll move on to credit cards today.

The credit card market is in an interesting place in the UK right now; there’s plenty of talk of the credit crunch and the tightening up of lending criteria but a cursory glance at a comparison site like Motley Fool credit cards shows that the market’s absolutely rammed with extremely competitive deals.

Take the whole interest free on balance transfers thing, seems like all the big lenders are offering one and, such is the competition in the market right now, they’re all trying to trump each other by offering longer and longer introductory periods. The Barclaycard platinum card (14 months) and Natwest and RBS credit cards (both 13 months) are both pretty tempting but the market leader at the moment looks like the Virgin Money card with 15 months 0% on balance transfers. Not at all bad.

Even the supermarkets seem to be getting in on the act; Sainsburys, Tesco and Asda all offer 0% credit cards complete with enticing shopping rewards. Just remember, if you’re trying to pay off debts with a balance transfer card spending money on it really isn’t a great idea.

I don’t know how easy it is to get accepted for these deals but I’d imagine a good credit rating is probably necessary. Interestingly, there’s been a lot of press coverage of Egg (bought by Citibank last year) ditching 161,000 customers because they were retrospectively deemed “high risk”. The move has stirred up a lot of negative publicity for Egg because there’s a feeling that they’re actually banning responsible borrowers with squeaky clean credit records. After all these are the customers who aren’t making them any money because they pay off their balance in full every month and don’t have to pay any interest.

Whether or not the Egg culling is a genuine effort to ditch “high risk” borrowers or curb expenses by ditching less profitable customers there does appear to be wider shift towards tougher lending criteria since the sub-prime crisis last year.

In fact, even prior to the credit crunch lenders profitability was being negatively effected by increasing numbers of debt-ridden customers defaulting on payments, causing many to bump up their interest rates and review their pricing and acquisition model. As early as May 2007 Datamonitor pointed out that major lenders were “shifting their focus to better quality lending”. Alliance and Leicester Loans for example stated in their Annual Report and Accounts 2006 that “changes to our credit criteria have resulted in new loans written in 2006 being of higher quality than in 2005.”

Having pledged my allegiance to the local soccer team (you won’t believe the number of times I’ve been told off for calling it soccer) Leyton Orient – I’ve spent the past couple of months following their faltering progress in Division One of the Football League without actually braving one of their matches.

Things haven’t been going great; since I’ve started taking any notice they’ve lost to the likes of Northampton, Huddersfield, Crewe and some other places I’ve never heard of, so I wasn’t particularly optimistic when I finally got around to seeing them play last night. My friend and die hard O’s fan Steve seemed confident enough though and was clearly exited to be introducing a Yank to the joys of English football.

The opposition was Swindon which obviously meant nothing to me but they’re apparently positioned below Orient in the League so expectations were high. In fact Steve’s confidence was such that he managed to convince me to put a bet on the game. I promptly went on the Blue Square football betting website and staked £10 on the O’s to win 2-1 (as advised by Steve); however underwhelming the football turned out to be the fact that I now had money on the outcome seemed likely to spice things up a bit.

Actually the whole experience turned out to be a really good night’s entertainment; I’ve been to plenty of ball games in America but this was something altogether different; obviously Leyton Orient are no Man Utd so the ground was quite small but even in this relatively modest stadium the atmosphere was great – lots of singing and abusive shouting – I had a ball.

And to top it all off, waddaya know, Orient won 2-1; I walked away with a nice little sum of money and my first experience of English soc.. I mean football. I think I’ll return.

Well, reader, I’ve gone and booked my vacation. The Barcelona plan was too good not to go with, I found a well-priced flight with FlyMonarch (always worth a look for cheap flights apparently) and I’ll be staying at my good friend Marvin’s place. It’s all worked out nicely.

And it doesn’t stop there! I figured that because I’m making a saving on accommodation by staying with Marvin I can afford to extend my break a little. So, essentially Spain is my oyster; I’m thinking somewhere on the coast would be nice but I’m keen to avoid anywhere that’s overdeveloped which according to my research rules out places like the Costa del Sol, a shame because I’ve see some pretty cheap flights to Malaga.

I’m going to contemplate this for a while and rack my brain for any more old friends who happen to have relocated to Spain.

So what else is going on in my life right now? Well not too much really; lots of work… I mentioned my new Mustang already… um, I got some new ‘all day’ contact lenses which are working out well. Maybe I’ll leave it there until I’ve got something more exciting to report back.

Sorry it’s been a while; things have been pretty hectic over the last few days; my house in Leyton, a charming if less than salubrious part of East London, was plunged into sub-arctic temperatures over the weekend when the boiler juddered to an abrupt halt. As you can imagine London in February is no place to be boiler-less – I just about survived a night wrapped up in several layers of sheets and my coziest pajamas and awoke determined to get the boiler fixed before the day was up. The cold shower certainly gave me some added motivation.

Unfortunately my housemates weren’t around so I had to deal with the problem myself – not great seeing as I know next to nothing about boilers and even less about how to go about getting one fixed in the UK. After a bit of investigation I found out that the boiler was from British Gas who, happily, have a home care service. So, the guy comes round, does his thing and, shock horror, its well and truly bust. So, to cut a long story short, we’ve gotta get a new boiler. Damn.

I dunno how much that’s gonna be and I’ll have to sort the cost out with Bartosz (I call him Bart) and Piotr (Pete) my housemates, but the British Gas guy reckoned our boiler has probably been close to shot for some time now which means we’ve been paying way more than we should have. Apparently our new boiler will be way more efficient so we’ll save money in the long run, unfortunately I probably aint gonna be here for the long run. Still, nice to know that whoever lives here next will benefit from a nice new boiler and cheaper bills.

I’ve been in London for a couple of months now and I reckon it’s about time I saw a bit more of Europe, the question is where should I go? Obviously, being in Europe for a limited time I want to see as much of it as I can, the problem is my travel funds are kinda limited so I’ve really got to prioritize.

I’ve recently started subscribing to the Travelzoo newsletter which, if you aren’t already familiar with it, seems like a great resource for cash strapped travelers. Basically they track down all the best deals on travel and cheap flights, test book them to make sure they’re all good and then compile a weekly list of their top 20 travel deals. This week’s list has stuff like a Dover to Calais ferry ticket (for the geographically impaired that’s UK to France) for £20 including 6 bottles of wine (that’s the sort of perk I can dig), and a 4 star Greek island holiday for a very reasonable sounding £154.

So I’ve been using the list for inspiration and I have to say I’m definitely being drawn towards the sunnier destinations – after two months of British winter I really need a bit of a solar recharge. The Greek islands thing definitely appeals, I’ve been checking out some of the islands like Crete and Mykonos online and I must say they look like exactly what I had in mind; historically interesting, naturally beautiful and, hopefully, nice and hot. More on my travel deliberations next time.

There’s a lot of talk in the British press of base rate cuts at the moment. Last week the base rate was trimmed to 5.25% and further cuts are being widely predicted in the not too distant future. The effect this is likely to have on savings accounts seems to be a bit of an unknown at the moment but it’s likely that, despite the rate cuts, fierce competition amongst banks to attract customers will ensure that savings accounts won’t be too badly affected.

At the moment there are still plenty of competitive deals on the market, indeed it’s still not hard to find savings accounts offering interest of 6.5% or better. For those concerned about their long term savings prospects however my advice would be to act quickly.

If you’ve already got a savings account then you should probably check whether the rate has already been affected – if you don’t feel like your deal is as competitive as it might be then don’t be afraid to move. Considering the possibility of further rate cuts it makes sense to look at fixed deals. If interest rates continue to be reduced through the year then there’s a good chance of diminishing returns.

The Icesave fixed rate savings account offers a particularly impressive 6.60% fixed rate for 2 years which seems like a pretty great deal to me.

Alternatively, and you’ll appreciate that this is a bit of a new one to me seeing as they don’t actually exist stateside, you could look at a fixed rate ISA. Obviously tax free savings are always going to be a good option but a fixed rate ISA in particular makes a lot of sense right now; the Nationwide fixed rate cash ISA is fixed at 6.15% over 2 years or if you fancy chancing it with a variable rate how about the A&L Direct ISA at 6.25% (they also offer a pretty decent savings account offering 6.50%).

The Price of Love

So it’s that time of year once again – Valentine’s Day is approaching and as per usual it’s kinda caught me by surprise. I haven’t got round to mentioning it before but there is a Mrs Soul Man back in Detroit and I’m starting to panic that the chances of getting a token of my love to her are becoming pretty slim.

Obviously the fact that I’m currently the other side of the world is mitigating but nonetheless in my experience this still won’t cut the mustard as an excuse when it comes to Valentine’s Day. This is the one time of year when the ladies expect a grand statement – I think they’re competitive about it – anything less and you stand the chance of landing yourself in the doghouse.

So what can I do? I’m not too enamored with the idea of international delivery costs (call me tight if you like but I prefer frugal – hey, I’m a financial advisor whaddaya want!) Flowers generally save the day in these situations and happily this means I can place an order online (I went for flowers from Interflora in the end, they’re a UK company but offer flower delivery in the US) and get it delivered locally without shelling out on international shipping - easy.

For the record I opted for “Abundant Rose Valentines Day Bouquet” which didn’t exactly come cheap – Never let it be said that the soul man ain’t a romantic.

Ok, back to the travel plans. As I was saying last time Greece is making a lot of sense right now – history, beaches, heat… Looking at my other options though, Spain holidays are pretty popular in England and a trip to Espana sounds pretty appealing. Going back to the Travelzoo list there’s a vacation in Tenerife for £99; sounds good and the photo’s look nice but I’ve since been warned by English colleagues that the Canary Islands will be packed with, and I quote: “larger swilling British louts”. I’m not really sure if this is what I want from a vacation, I encounter enough of that in London.

How about cruises in the vicinity of Spain; again Travelzoo have some tempting deals – a 5 night cruise for £192? Can’t say I’ve ever been on a cruise before, in, fact my seafaring experiences have been pretty limited. The idea does kind of appeal to me though so maybe one to keep in mind.

I’m also tempted by Barcelona; I’ve always wanted to see that crazy Gaudi architecture in the flesh and everyone says it’s a great city with a buzzing atmosphere again there are some good deals out there and I’ve found flights to Spain on Cheapflights.co.uk for about £75 from Heathrow to Barcelona. The big advantage of Barcelona is that Marvin, an old friend from way back, is living out there; I’m sure he’d be thrilled to put me up for a few days…

Well, yesterday I bit the bullet and bought myself a new dream machine, my first car since I’ve been in the UK. First thing I need to get off my chest is that damn driving’s expensive over here! Seriously, not only are the cars themselves more expensive, the insurance is more expensive and the gas is way more expensive; I was very nearly put off getting a car at all but y’know being a Detroit boy it’s in my blood.

I wanted something with a bit of personality; most of the cars over here are pretty dull, kinda small and rounded – not what I’m used to driving at all. So I started thinking, what would my ideal car be? A car that reflects something of my personality and my roots, and then it struck me like a message from James Brown… A Ford Mustang!

It quickly dawned on me that you really don’t see too many Ford Mustangs round London and that perhaps there’s a reason for that. In fact, it turns out that Mustang’s were never released this side of the pond so tracking one down was gonna be something of a challenge. Still, I had my heart set on the idea now and after hunting through a couple of listings papers I found my perfect match on the Fish4 used cars website – a red 68 Mustang.

It’s a little rusty in places but what do you want – it’s 40 years old! Otherwise it drives like a dream and suites me down to the ground.

Putting my financial adviser hat on again briefly; I ended up getting car insurance and loan from Asda Personal Loans. Asda are actually a supermarket chain owned by Wall Mart but it turns out they offer some pretty decent finance deals – I got the loan at a very reasonable 6.9% and the car insurance seemed to be competitive. I might cover the whole financing a car issue in a bit more detail in my next post.

Money on my mind

One of the first things you’re faced with when you move to a new country is the frankly pretty daunting task of sorting out your finances. I’ve been here a while now and as much as I’ve tried to bury my head in the ground - let’s face it no one enjoys scrutinizing their finances (especially if you’ve just moved to London and realized that life is about to get a whole lot more expensive) sometimes these things just have to be done.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff to take care of, from a new bank account to the requisite credit card so I thought, at the risk of boring my mysterious readership to death with finance waffle, I’d make myself useful and use some of my experiences to offer some financial advice on this blog – I used to do a bit of this sort of thing in my old job so hopefully I can turn my financial travails to someone’s advantage.

First up for me was sorting out a new current account - you really can’t get far without one these days and thankfully they’re generally pretty quick and easy to set up. The tricky thing, particularly for a foreigner with no prior knowledge of most of the banks over here, is choosing which to go for.

The advantage I have as someone with a newcomer’s fresh perspective is that I can hopefully approach things in a relatively objective fashion. The first thing I’ve noticed is that despite the market being pretty competitive many people seem, whether through apathy or some strange form of loyalty, to be stuck with remarkably uncompetitive bank accounts. Most of the most popular accounts on the market the Barclays and RBS current accounts for instance offer 0.1% AER on balances when even a cursory glance at comparison tables show that there are plenty of accounts out there (the Halifax and Alliance and Leicester bank accounts currently top the table) which offer interest that is almost on a par with savings accounts. Quite why so many people stick with their horribly uncompetitive bank accounts when such superior deals are out there is beyond me.

For the record I ended up going for the A&L current account which also offers an interest fee overdraft and an exclusive 12% (!) savings account.