ValueIreland.com

Since June, I’ve been commuting to work by bus. On many occasions, I haven’t had the correct fare, and received these refund tickets from the driver. I’ve been saving these up before a trip into town to collect my refund money in total (which you get from Dublin Bus headquarters at 59 Upper O’Connell Street).

You could almost look at this as a kind of painless saving arrangement - a few pence in change a day over a few weeks or months would surely add up. I’d been intending to send mine on to Sunshine House in Balbriggan with whom I volunteer every summer for a week.

But my change refund tickets are worth nothing apparently, thanks to this sentence on the Dublin Bus website, “Note that we cannot refund without both tickets being presented.”

I didn’t know this, and I don’t have the original tickets for my change refund tickets. I’m going to mail them today to see how flexible they are on this, so my charitable donation is on hold for the moment.

You’d think that making a phone call on your mobile to a number in China would be horribly expensive. I thought so too until I discovered that at certain times, calling China can be cheaper than calling my ma home down the country.

From previous posts, you’ll know that I used to be with 3. While with them, I needed to send text messages fairly regularly to someone I know travelling in China. But 3 didn’t send messages to China, and they didn’t know when they’d be providing that facility - and obviously not bothered with the Chinese market in Ireland.

Unlike O2 I discovered. I bought one of their cheap Speak Easy prepay phones in order to send these messages. Fine, no problems there. I made one or two phone calls as well, but since I was on free credit originally, I didn’t pay attention to the cost.

Then recently, they sent me a message telling me that I could make calls to China for 15c per minute. This is a great price and is the same as calling Irish landlines on some O2 price plans. So I was able to make great use of that price.

Since moving to Vodafone, I didn’t have the issue with sending text messages, since Vodafone actually deliver texts to China. However, I checked the per minute cost on my monthly price plan for calling China - €3.23 per minute. Unbelievable. But as the helpful person on Vodafone Customer Care pointed out, if I used a Vodafone Pay As You Go phone, I’d get the same calls for 5c per minute.

So, I’ll get a Vodafone SIM card for €9.99. I’ll automatically get €15 free credit with that which will refund me the cost of the card, and I’ll get a further 50 free minutes straight away. And future calls will save me 10c per minute.

So, shopping around, and looking at all the alternatives can definitely save you money - even on dreaded mobile phone costs.

CIE are looking to increase their fares by 9% according to this article in the Sunday Times yesterday. As a fairly satisified user of Dublin Bus to get to my real job in the mornings, this would increase my current €1.55 fare to probably €1.70. This would be an increase of €6 per month in my travelling expenses which is not too bad since it’s still €78 less than what I was paying when I drove to work.

We’ve seen lots of comments recently, and this article adds to that, regarding how government organisations are responsible for increasing their process at three times the current rate of inflation.

However, take London for example. I was over there a couple of weeks ago, and their standard bus fare for any length of journey was £1.50 – which actually works out to being €2.20. So Dublin fares don’t compare too badly.

However, the reasoning behind the flat fare in London, I believe, is because they’ve implemented the Oyster Card which is a single travel pass arrangement where you can use the same swipe card on buses, the underground, regular trains, the Docklands Light Railway, and trams.

We’re a long time waiting for integrated ticketing for public transport in Dublin. It’ll be interesting to see whether standard flat fares become policy in that implementation, and if so, what they’ll set those rates at, and whether or not they’ll be the excuse for any further price rises.

I was reading this thread on AskAboutMoney this morning about last weeks TV programme “In Search of the Pope’s Children” fronted by the author of the original book, David McWilliams. The second episode was to be on tonight. First things first, I didn’t watch the programme, and I haven’t read the book, and I won’t be watching tonight either.

A comment on the thread which made me think was the following – “He claimed the foundations of the New Ireland aren’t half as stable as we’d like to believe saying it was founded upon three economic factors: cheap credit, cheap energy and cheap labour.”

Something that’s been occupying my mind in recent months has been based on how people are funding their childrens education, and their own retirement funds. To my untrained eyes, and from reading many newspaper articles and many of the posts on AskAboutMoney, it appears that most people are “investing” in order to provide for those future financial needs.
People are buying property (home or abroad), or their investing in special childrens education savings accounts, or they investing in the stock market or market based funds. All this is to take money now, and hope that it earns more money in order to have funds for their future needs. And there’s nothing wrong with any of this.

But what does any of this do for our own Irish economy in the long run? The reason I raise this was that in the early 1980’s my father set up his own business which started off employing 3 people, peaked at 45, and had a constant average of about 25 until he sold it in the late 1990’s.

The three reasons he gave for setting up this business were:
To get away from his existing jobs
To fund his kids passage through college
To set himself up for his retirement

By the time he sold the business, he’d successfully met all three targets and he began what is still a very fruitful and enjoyable retirement.

However, at the same time as he met his own three personal goals there, he also provided employment in a small town in the west of Ireland for large numbers of people during the nearly 20 years he ran the company. As well as sorting himself and his family out, he was also helping the financial goals of many many other people and families at the same time through the employment he provided. This was particularly important given the timing of when he set up the business – in the darker days of the 1980’s.

People today investing in property or stocks, I believe, don’t have that same positive impact on the Irish economy as my father did – especially when the investment leaves the country. I personally have a concern about that and where the country will end up if we continue down that path.

In the past week, the Irish Independent has published two articles discussing the types of insurance that you don’t need. These articles are here and here. Obviously they highlight that people should be very careful in reviewing their own situation before deciding whether or not to buy certain types of insurance.

Funny thing happened to me a few years ago in Dixons on Oxford Street. I’d decided to buy a PDA personal organiser so the saleperson went out back to get one from stock. While he was out there, another salesperson came over pushing me to buy insurance on the item. Highlighting all the bad things that could happen me, as well as the “expensive” PDA itself, he was quite insistent.

My response, which it always is in such circumstances, that given how much money I was paying for the thing in the first place, that I’d be most careful in looking after it, and that I haven’t lost anything yet, touch wood.

Anyway, the first salesperson comes back from the stores with the item, trips over his ankles coming to the counter, and drops the PDA he was carrying. Almost cracking up, I turned to the second salesperson asking whether or not they had insurance themselves.

To finish this story, the first guy came over and handed over the PDA box. Obviously I wasn’t taking it, since he’d dropped it. I asked for another from the store. He was about to take back the one he dropped, but I made sure he left that one behind him so I could be sure I wasn’t given it back again behind the scened.

I did a search on Google for “insurance you don’t need” and there are 755 returned items, mostly focused on U.S. insurance buyers. A similar search, interestingly, for Google.ie, Ireland only, returns 0 results.

So, to help out, I’ve put together a listing for Irish consumers of insurance that they don’t need which will hopefully at least make the Google.ie search listing. If used correctly (bearing in mind their own personal situation), it’s likely that lots of consumers will save money using the information there.

Click here to read the Value Ireland Tips on Insurance you Don’t Need.

Given all my comments here previously about credit card surcharges, and todays earlier comments regarding the £11 per ticket service charges with Ticketmaster.co.uk, I thought I’d give a quick mention to Leopardstown Race course.

I booked 4 tickets online with them today for the December 26th meeting - one of their most popular meetings for the whole year. And their service charge was €2.54. Total. For 4 tickets. Not per ticket.

Nice one. How can these people, whose raison d’etre isn’t selling tickets but to run race meetings, manage to charge less for a service than Ticketmaster who are the experts in selling the damn things?

The National Consumer Agency is currently running a campaign warning Irish consumers of the dangers of different scams that are constantly running which attempt to relieve them of their cash. One radio advert I’ve heard has warned about being told that you’ve won a prize (in a competition you haven’t entered) where you have to pay an administration charge up front before you’ll get your prize. There are further details on their new site with further warnings of different scams.

These types of scams can come at you by phone, or mostly by e-mail. More recently, mobile phones have also been targetted - called Smishing.

These last two mainly target you via e-mail. Just to show the kind of crap you can get through e-mail these days, here are the details of some mails I’ve received today alone:

Sears (a store in the US with which I have no contact) in the US have notified
me that there’s been a payment made on my account.

“Agent Matt Dillon” has told me that I’ve won €1.5m euro in the the “Pepsi Lottery Company Promotion”. I just have to e-mail them back and they’ll tell me how to win this prize.

The San Wu Rubber Mfg.Company are offering me a job whereby I accept payments from their clients, and then forward the money on to them. For this, they’ll pay me 7% of all money transferred.

The Central Bank of Nigeria have a contract of $10m which they need my help in finding an owner for. If I’m willing, they’ll actually give me that money.

Paypal have mailed me to tell me that they’ve had to limit my account because of
suspicious payments. I don’t have a Paypal account.

Mr.James Roberts has access to £2.5m belonging to the late Mr.Grant Woods. If I help him get this money, he’ll kindly give me a cut of it as well. Nice man!

Wells Fargo Online Banking have just upgraded their systems and they need me to log in via the link in the e-mail to update my account details.

And finally, and most intriguingly Dr. Ken Brown mailed me. In his own words, “I am Dr KEN BROWN,the Head of Operations Fixed Depsit Department OF a pRIVATE bANK hERE IN Central London Uk.I have an urgent business proposal for ou.please get back to me for more details.”

Value Ireland has detailed information and avoidance tips on two specfic scams to watch out for. These were phishing (go here) where your bank details are targetted - some Bank of Ireland customers have fallen foul of this, and “pump and dump” share scams (go here).

Today’s the day for new websites. I’ve just seen it mentioned on the AskAboutMoney forum that the Small Claims (Court) Online project has been launched in a pilot format.

This is being run by the courts service, as you can see from the actual web address you get to when you access the www.smallclaims.ie web address.

I’ve never submitted a small claim, so I don’t know how good the site is. I went part way through the process online and found it fairly intuitive.

One thing I did notice though was that there wasn’t much blurb to let people know (apart from the €2000 limit) under what circumstances they may lodge a small claim. There isn’t either really a clear description of what the process is when lodging a small claim if you haven’t done this before. These may be detailed within the application process, but I would have thought it’d be handier up front.

For the Value Ireland information sheet on the Small Claims Court process, please click here.

The new website for the National Consumer Agency is being publicised at the moment. I would definitely recommend that people check it out and bookmark it for future reference. From looking through it for the past week or so, it does have some excellent content. I find the colours and navigation a bit iffy, but overall the site is very good.

A couple of items of particular note for me. Firstly is the ODCA Prosecutions listing which details the names and offences of Irish businesses who have been successfully prosecuted for breaching Irish consumer legislation. No harm in reviewing this every so often to see who’s being named and shamed, and then use this as a listing of companies that people should boycott in future. Value Ireland will be doing more work on this in the near future.

Secondly, the website has a link to Sign Up for Consumer Alerts. I’m guessing it’ll be worthwhile to sign up for this to be up to date on what’s happening on the site, and what research they may make available in the future.

Overall, though such a resource was such a long time coming, it’s definitely been worth the wait.

Have just received an e-mail from a mate who’s in the process of buying tickets for the Irish games for the 2007 Rugby World Cup. Here’s his observations on the difficulties presented to Irish consumers when trying to buy these tickets.

Rip-off No. 1:
You go to Ticketmaster.ie, and that website directs you to different areas if you’re UK/Ireland or rest of world. Rest of world pays €12 for Ireland vs African qualifier (1st game) while UK & Ireland pay £9 or €13.47. Why a 10% price hike, and why sterling charge for Ireland, when it’s in the euro zone, and the games are all in the euro zone as well? Why can’t Ticketmaster Ireland process the sales of Irish RWC tickets?

Rip-off No. 2:
When making purchases, the UK ticketmaster site has refused the ability to combine tickets into one order for the 4 games. Instead, they had to be ordered individually for each game, with an £11 delivery charge per order. A whopping €65 processing fee to purchase just 4 €12 tickets.

Rip-off No. 3:
AerLingus.com - Fly the week before the first Ireland game and it’s E29 one way into Bordeaux. Fly the Friday or Saturday before the first game, a Sunday kickoff, and it €155 …. And this for flights in September 2007! So much for cheaper flights if bought well in advance.

While none of the above is illegal, it stinks of price gouging on the part of Ticketmaster. I’ve already talked here about the campaign to get rid of these processing charges (here and here), and this insistance of charging £11 processing fee for the privelage of buying a £9 ticket is unbelievably crass.