pound versus AUD

Generali

oneeye1 wrote: »

can someone please explain why the pound is so weak against the aud and what will make it reverse.

thank you

If you are a bank, the Bank of England will lend to you at the base rate, ie at 0.5% if you lodge some security with them in the form of a Government bond.

You can then take that money and lend it to a bank in Australia at about 5% (link - table f1) with your returns guaranteed by the Aussie Government (taxpayer).

hcb42 wrote: »

Tax is higher as well.

I know the grass isnt greener, as I lived there for two years.

right now though I would sell my house (40% ltv) and would have the capital to buy a garden shed over there.

The tax take in Australia is considerably lower than that in the UK and most developed countries except the US. A big part of that is the miniscule national debt which means us taxpayers have most of our tax spent on services and bureaucracy rather than on paying interest to investors.

dawyldthing

rumdiddlyum wrote: »

wish i had tried at school then i would have a good enough job to go to australia but would deffo be scared about the giant spiders and mr ts craziest fools

if your under 31 and don't mind working in fruit picking/bar work etc you can get a years working holiday visa, extended by a year if you do fruit picking for at least 3 months. Someone I met in Thailand said in Perth they need cleaners that bad there paying $35 an hour (18 quid ish). Things are apparently expensive over there, but when apparently the hourly wage is 17 dollars an hour or so if you don't mind working then it would be a sound place to go.

I think i'll end up going in a few years time as the prospects in England diminish by the day!

Thrugelmir

Thought that this article was interesting. For those complaining about the UK's.

It's official - Australia's big banks are the most profitable in the world.

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3254733.htm

vikingaero

My brother emigrated to Oz last year. A few observations of his: Even though he is on an Oz wage some things which strike him as being really expensive are eating out and the price of cars. He bought a car a few years ago in Oz for $2,000, drove it for 2 years and sold it for $2,000. He's bought a 2007 Golf now which he reckoned would have got him a 2010 Golf in the UK.

Generali

vikingaero wrote: »

My brother emigrated to Oz last year. A few observations of his: Even though he is on an Oz wage some things which strike him as being really expensive are eating out and the price of cars. He bought a car a few years ago in Oz for $2,000, drove it for 2 years and sold it for $2,000. He's bought a 2007 Golf now which he reckoned would have got him a 2010 Golf in the UK.

Australia is expensive. Most industries are carved up between two or three players so there is very little competition as a result. Thrugelmir's comments about the Aussie banking sector reflect that although things are slowly getting better due to increased price transparancy resulting from the internet. It's normal to pay an 'account holding fee' of perhaps $5/month (ie $60/£40 a year) just for the pleasure of having a bank account and it might cost you $200 to apply for a loan.

I've not found eating out to be massively expensive. My local pub charges about $30 (£20) for a very good steak. At a 'normal' exchange rate that would be perhaps £12. That's for a 300gm sirloin steak of pretty high quality in very nice surroundings. Has he tried his local RSL/sports club? They're normally cheaper and can be very good. They can be bloody awful too mind.

There are some truly bizarre pricing structures over here. For example when you buy a mobile phone contract you pick a 'price cap'. In the parallel world of Australian retail, a cap is the minimum price you pay for the bill not the maximum!

One of the reasons I think that cars depreciate slowly in Aus is that they last longer so the price falls over a longer period. The reason I guess is that they don't put salt on the roads so they don't rust anything like as fast. The cars that do depreciate more quickly, although not as fast as British cars, are ones that are used in the country as they take a battering from being driving on unpaved roads a lot.

purch

P.S. GBP is not weak, against the AUD or any other currency.

GBP is at it's correct value against those currencies, and vica versa. Lot's of money has been lost by people thinking they know more than the market.