I don't understand money, but I've worked out how to fund war heroes care.

I don't understand money, possibly because I have never had enough of it to be on close terms. I know money only as a fleeting acquaintance. For example a recent £3000 endowment policy matured, and remained within my bank account for about an hour before it paid off my credit card balance and for some urgent repairs on my car. They say money talks, but mine barely has time to learn the local dialect before it is saying goodbye.
I follow the basics of finance, in that there are 100 pennies to the pound, and six zeros behind a million, and 9 behind a billion (unless you are American, they seem to follow their own rules)
I can even follow basic interest rates in that 2% interest means you get £102 a year back for every £100 invested. What I can't quite follow is negative interest, the idea that the bank would charge me to look after my money, so that for every £100 I invest I get £98 back. A financial dumb dumb I may be, but at that point shoving it under the mattress seems a better option. Particularly as I have a safe built into the house which I could throw the mattress on top of. Of course having cash around the house is not a good idea in these dark times. Anything over a couple of hundred quid and you are likely to mistaken for a drugs baron money laundering his ill gotten gains, because we live pretty much in a cashless society otherwise. I rarely have more than £30 in my wallet, and being a working married man it is usually less than that.
What I can't comprehend however is other peoples attitude to money.

Hitting the headlines today is the story of two senior employees with the Crown Prosecution Service. They are apparently being investigated in a fraud case for up to £1 million expenses claimed for taxi fares. This is a staggering amount. I would assume that this has accrued over a number of years, but how? Has nobody noticed this? 1/2 a million each in taxi fares couldn't go unnoticed even over five years. And surely the accountants do an annual review, the Inland Revenue must look at the figures, and Mr CPS Limited can;t have failed to notice the money leeching from the public funds. Lets' say then that this must have happened with the last financial year to have gone unnoticed at the last review. Allowing these guys two weeks leave there are 50 working weeks to keep things simple. £1/2 a million over 50 weeks is £10,000 a week. Excuse me? I bought a 4 year old Vauxhall Vectra a few years back for less than half of that, and can run it for a year on a couple of grand including insurance. That allows one hell of a parking budget and still gives change out of £10000. I could pay a chauffeur a handsome £30000 a year to drive me around and still only spend £40000 a year. So in one month I could have bought a decent car paid for it's running costs. In two or three months I could have bought and paid for a brand new executive car and been chauffeur driven whilst a private masseur attended to my every need. Yet these guys were claiming that much for black cabs and nobody noticed? I can only assume they were being driven by his holiness The Stig in a gold plated special edition Bugatti Veyron.

It beggers belief that public money can be squandered unnoticed by other public officials in this way and yet we force our war heroes to sell their homes to pay for their care in their twilight years. Because the other news that caught my eye this week was the story of a WW2 RAF fighter pilot, who was decorated for many deeds of bravery and had an enviable 19 kills to his score sheet during the hostilities with Germany, is being forced to sell his medals to raise the estimated £120,000 he needs to pay for his care home. This is an absolute disgrace. We owe our lives and freedom to "the few" and those who battled in the theater of war so that we might enjoy those freedoms. The medals we present them with are mere bits of stamped metal but their rarity and what they stand for makes them value able beyond words to the recipients and their fallen comrades, their families and those who understand what they went through. That they can be sold to the highest bidder, some faceless collector who doesn't deserve them is abhorrent  That the ex serviceman should have to consider that option in his twilight years is a national disgrace.
So how about this for a suggestion. We currently have 2.5 million unemployed in receipt of benefits. This week we should deduct £1 from each of their benefit payments and fund the care of this war hero and others like him. £2.5 million could be raised just like that. A proportion of those 2.5 million, the genuinely unemployed minority would, I am sure, willingly donate a pound. The remainder are being funded by the workers and have their rights and freedoms funded by the surviving war heroes and others who gave their lives and endured hardships so they wouldn't have to, so a pound is the least they can give. And if, next week another war hero finds himself in the same position, we should do the same again. Because I'd be happier with a pound of my taxes supporting the genuinely needy than some drug taking alcoholic fat lazy scumbag on a council estate. And heroes should be buried with their medals, or pass them on to their families - lest we forget.
In essence it would seem we can spend public money on taxis for able bodied bureaucrats without anyone worrying, but we can't pay for a care home for retired disabled ex-servicemen.

Work harder to earn less.

As a kid I was encouraged to work hard to get on in life. My dad wasn't bothered what career I went into, whether it was emptying the bins or something more lowly, like an MP. Actually, he'd have probably disowned me if I had become an MP. The point was though, that hard work earned success, and success lead to a better lifestyle, and higher income.
However, the austerity measures have left me increasingly doubtful of Dads wisdom. Casual overtime used to be paid at time and a half, now it is time and a third. Working on a day off used to be double time, but now it's time and a half. So, work harder and you can still earn more, but less than you could.
So far so good. But today I got my tax code notice. Bad news is always buried in the good, and if something looks too good to be true it usually is. Too bloody true. On the face of it I can now earn an extra £1330 without paying tax. However, the tax bandings have been revised, which takes back a good proportion of that, meaning that I now pay 40% tax on the £530 basic pay that goes over the threshold. Following this so far? Basically I pay no tax on more money, the same amount of tax on just as much money but more tax on less money.
And then there is the question of overtime. If I have understood this correctly any overtime I work now will be taxed at the 40% rate which means that I will be earning £3.50 an hour LESS on overtime than I am on standard time. This wouldn't be so bad if mine was a job where overtime can be avoided, but it isn't. It's often an operational necessity to work overtime.
So, basically the harder I work, the more tax I pay and the less I earn. Meanwhile, some people don't work at all and had their benefits increased last year. Go figure!

Gale force winds save the economy

For many years gales have been measured using numbers, with Gale Force 10 being the strongest, and Gale Force 1 hardly worth a mention. Gale Force 1, so far as I can tell, is a breeze. Whilst we think of a force 10 as likely to take our roof off.
But has the "Force" scale gone out of fashion? We hardly hear of it on the weather forecast these days. Now we get Amber warnings, and if it gets really bad, I p[resume we will get a red warning. Which is all very nice, but the people with wind turbines will be very disappointed to get months and months of green warnings.
And even when the wind gets up really high, as it has done in the last few days around here, the little arrows on the weather map mean nothing to real people. 13 with a directional arrow? What is that about? Is it mph, kph or something else?
What I need is a windspeed indicator which warns, in no uncertain terms that my fence is about to fall over. A clear indicator that the solar panel is about to be blown off the summerhouse roof. And how this will affect my bank balance.
So, I am pleased to report I have the solution. It is rather localised I'm afraid, but in general terms the wind which blew through last Thursday rated £100 on the damage scale. That's on a DIY basis obviously. If I had a tradesman in to repair the damage it could easily have rated £300 to £400.
This compares favourably with the storm several years ago which rated at a DIY score of £300 and that was sharing the costs with the neighbour. Mind you, the shared fence very nearly took out his front room windows, so it could have been even higher.
The problem with this scale of course is that it can only be applied AFTER the event. Rather like the weather forecast, which spends the first five minutes telling us about the weather that has already happened. I know about the weather that happened, I was in it. Just warn us about the weather to come thanks. Specifically the local weather. the very local weather. The weather that will knock my fence down, block my driveway, burn me, make me wet, or freeze me.

I've just realized that I have turned into the archetypal Brit, talking about the weather because he has nothing else interesting to say. Well, to quote Stan Laurel - "A lot of weather we've been having lately."

Am I alone in thinking that wind is just part of life and to get on with fixing the damage it has caused? It's an act of God, or one of the Gods, that's for sure. But can I claim on my insurance for high winds? People claim for floods, and that is just weather, after all. Perhaps I'm missing out here. Wind certainly makes money for my local fencing supplier. It has probably kept his business going through the austerity measures. Maybe I should get on that gravy train too.