ValueIreland.com

This is part of a letter to todays Irish Independent from John Kenny in Dublin - the web page is here.

Regrettably, the article ‘Naked greed and passive consumers’ (Business, August 19) overlooked comparing like with like in a survey of grocery products. Had the report included the prices of own label products at Tesco, a saving of up to €60 would have been achieved over the cost of the basket of branded goods used by the National Consumer Agency. This is a notable saving and compares more than favourably with the €30 savings at the German discount stores.

I think this was partly touched upon by Conor Pope in his PriceWatch article where he compared branded Corn Flakes with Tesco own brand corn flakes.

Just to follow on a bit from the VI Savings Plan and the money making scheme below, a couple of months ago I decided to follow up on some of the usual bumpff about saving money on your electricity bills by turning off electrical items at the wall sockets and all that jazz.

There has been a lot of advertising and awareness campaigns about such things recently. The focus seems to be the useful Power of One website.

The key tips in question that I was looking at were here, for energy saving at home. Essentially, the points I followed religiously for two months were as follows:

1. Unplugged my phone charger when I wasn’t actually charging my phone.
2. Turned off my TV/Video/DVD/Digital box at the wall at night - equipment on stand-by uses up to 20% of the energy it would use when fully on.
3. I turned down my heating to 20ºC - lowering your thermostat by 1ºC will knock 10% off your heating bill. I also reduced the amount of time it was on for – though this was for gas, and I haven’t received my gas bill yet.
4. I have replaced all but 3 of the normal light bulbs in my house with compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) - they use 20% of the energy and last up to 15 times as long (though they are more expensive to buy).
5. I made sure to always switch off lights when I left a room - energy is wasted lighting unoccupied rooms. Also, there’s rarely need for lights on in hallways if you’re not there – though I know it’s an “Irish thing” to have lights on in the hallway when you’re home.
6. A simple thing that I used to always do, but then stopped was not overfilling my kettle - only boil as much water as you need.
7. They say to avoid unnecessary electricity use between 5pm and 7pm but I’m rarely home before 7 anyway, so that wasn’t really an issue.

So, for the first two months, my ESB bill went from €57 for two months to €46 for the last two months. Now, I know this was the summer period, but my usage on ESB wouldn’t change much across the year – the gas usage is where my usage would change coming to the winter.
So, €11 saved in two months. Assume something similar across the full year, and that could mean savings of about €66 (which doesn’t look that impressive), or of 20% (which looks a much better number).

It was pointed out to me yesterday that there’s a whole thread on www.askaboutmoney.com at the moment regarding peoples problems with another First Active savings account. Seems like I’m not the only person to experience such issues. The thread can be accessed here.

It’s a long time ago now since we published our VI Savings Plan – a simple way of saving a little extra money every week. It’s something that I pretty much follow myself in various guises all the time.

However, I’m going to share a different plan with you now on how I’m planning on making a little extra money this year. If you have an issue with gambling, you should probably stop reading this post now.

On the 11th of August I took €50 and have turned it so far into €86.43, a return so far of 73%. Not so bad! And it’s all down to Liverpool. In a scheme revised since it’s inception last year the plan is to have a bet on Liverpool to win every game of the season. Or, based on the revision from last year, the bets are essentially “win/no-draw” bets.
So, here’s how it works.

• Start with €50 balance
• Bet half the balance on Liverpool to win their first game of the season, no draw bet. Odds were a measly 5/2 on.
• Liverpool win – new balance is €60.
• Take half the new balance, and bet on Liverpool to win next game, €30 now at 10/3 on.
• And so on…..

Of course there are issues with this. Liverpool were 20/1 on to win their game with Toulouse last night in the Champions League qualifiers. The starting balance of €50 was small, and the odds are not great in general – 5/2 on has been the best so far in the first game.

Still, a bit better and more engaging than sticking €50 quid on Liverpool at the start of the season to win the Premier League. Regular updates to follow.

A couple of months ago I decided to set up a regular savings account with First Active. I had been planning on moving my mortgage to them via a staff offer with my employer. The regular saver account was to build up lump sums to pay down capital amounts every so often.

So, how hard can it be to have a savings account set up and some documentation sent out to me in order to have online access to my account? Very hard actually if First Active are anything to go by. After 4 e-mails to my investments advisor in First Active, I haven’t received the necessary documentation.

Each e-mail sent to me included the text “I’ll get that sent out to you tomorrow, and I’ll ring the following day to confirm you’ve received it”. And on each occasion, neither the documentation nor the phone call arrived.

If they can’t sort out a simple savings account, I’m not giving them my mortgage business either. Imagine such crap customer service when there’s thousands and thousands of euro at stake, rather than a couple of hundred. Sort of reinforces some other acquaintances comments about same company and how I might reconsider doing business with them.

Lets just see how long it takes me to get my money out of the savings account now and get it closed. They’ve the RaboDirect record of 6 months to beat!

They just don’t respond to requests to close their accounts. Last May, I sent a request to Rabobank to have my savings account with them closed. Today, eventually, I was told my account would be closed.

It has taken 4 written letters plus numerous e-mails and phone calls to actually get this to happen. The final straw was the need for two “security calls” where they had to ring me to confirm some security questions before closing the account.

When I was called this morning, the first question was “So Mr.MacShane, why have you decided to close your account?” When I asked to be asked security questions rather than these survey questions, the customer service person started to seem irate that I didn’t want to follow the script.

I suppose, since it had taken 6 months to get this far, I should have given them the extra 2 minutes just to be done with them and to be nice.

Speaking of heading to Galway, we stayed in the Days Hotel on the Dublin Road. The room rates were the cheapest we could find for the weekend - €140 per night.

For a basic room with no breakfast included, I think thats pretty steep. Especially when you compare to the original Days hotels as you’d experience in the United States. Basic roadside motels, average prices from a fifth to a half of the Galway price.

Credit where credit’s due - fair play to Irish Rail last Friday. I was on the train heading to Leixlip to meet a mate to head to Galway for another mates stag.

Stupidly, I left my bag on the train as it headed off to Maynooth. I rang through to Maynooth train station and got talking to a most helpful guy there (Mick I think was his name, who normally works in Drumcondra).

He said he’d check on the train and call me back. He met the train arriving in Maynooth, found the bag with the driver, and the driver brought it back on his return journey. Mick rang me back to confirm, and I collected my bag only 15minutes later, with no hassle at all.

Nice work boys!

I was driving back from Galway last night after the Connaught v South Africa game. (I’d like to post a report of the match, but it seems that no media outlet has published anything that I can find about the game).

Anyway, on the way home, I came across what, to me, is probably the most annoying thing about other road users. Driving along outside Ballinasloe, I came up behind someone cruising along at maybe 60/70kmph where the limit might be 100kmph. This gentleman was on the phone – hence, presumably, the reason for driving slower – needing to concentrate on the call.

Given a safe location, I indicated and made my move to overtake the slower moving vehicle. Only for this muppet to suddenly realise that someone in a lowly Ford was about to overtake them in their 07 D Lexus 4WD, and they accellerate significantly – still on the phone, mind you.

So here I am, other side of the road, accelerating to overtake, and this muppet accelarates to my same speed, keeping me from moving in front of him. All because he has a small penis inside in his Lexus, and can’t abide being overtaken by mere mortals while he’s wishing beddie byes to Fiachra and Chantelle.
Clown! Clown! Clown! Leinster supporters shouldn’t be allowed go to Connaught games anyway! I should report him on www.shitedrivers.com. Check it out – decent blog with loads of potential.

Another, and if I’m not mistaken, the last remaining Irish bank has now come out and admitted that it too has overcharged it’s customers. Today Ulster bank has admitted that it overcharged 25000 customers €4m.

Does it even matter how, or why they thieved this money from their customers? If you are interested in the details, as per usual, you won’t find anything on the Press Release section on their website. You won’t find it either on their What’s New? Section on their homepage either.

Click here to read the Breakingnews.ie version of the story.

This now brings (as far as we in http://www.valueireland.com/ can estimate) the total number of Irish customers overcharged by Irish businessess to 1,322,200 and to the tune of €111,743,000m. Our continuously updated analysis of overcharging in Ireland is available here.

Just look at those numbers again - they’re unbelievable.

One thought! I wonder what kind of “ongoing review” were Ulster Bank doing to find this mistake? Were they looking for instances of overcharging? Shouldn’t that have been completed a couple of years ago? Or I wonder did someone find the problem and highlight it to Ulster Bank, which then lead to the review in question?