Preparedness for when

Frugalsod

1Tonsil wrote: »

Yes I could get out euros with my uk debit card but the fee is 12 euros per hundred, so quite an expensive way to live for any amount of time. The same goes for the visa, which has an exchange fee and interest from the day you draw out cash, even if you are in credit on the card by paying extra money onto it. pre paid UK cards are not being accepted at the moment.

I went to the bank today and the money is still not available to us, in any amount, not just restricted amounts. So I have sent an email to the Greek Bank ombudsman to see if I have a case for them to follow up. My sister is coming at the end of this week so we have asked her to bring us some sterling across for emergency money.

We could transfer some money from our uk bank, but I am not sure I trust the banks to give me that either. I have a feeling they are going to close a couple of them down and take the deposits:eek: I think the banks and the country are in a far worse state than they are telling us.

I can see things going downhill for the Greek people while the tourists are here, so it is going to be really bad in the winter. I have friends with businesses and I honestly dont see how they can continue for much longer, with no access to money to pay bills and suppliers.

We are going to have to try to find a solution to our banking issues, but there does not seem to be an easy way. We could transfer money, but will we get access to it if we do? It is a big worry at the moment and the cash restrictions could go on for months....

Did the bank explain why sterling funds were not being converted? It might be the lack of euros that is the reason. I cannot see an ombudsman being able to do anything about that.

Unfortunately I think the restrictions will go on for years, the same will apply to capital controls. The plan of the ECB is to cripple the economy to set an example to any other nation thinking about defaulting. Greece are being made an example of.

So things will get worse just to prove the ECB and the troika can say "told you so". Nothing about human rights the only rights they are concerned about are creditor rights.

The reason I suggested open a bank in Italy was so that you might find it easier to get there to get money cashed, either that or fly bank to the UK for euros. While that might be more expensive it will be more reliable than the banks.

I suspect that all the banks in Greece are insolvent and that there will only be two banks left by the time the ECB finishes, and that the bail-ins will be significant. So many small and medium sized businesses will fold in due course.

smeeth

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

DD and I went for a walk this afternoon along the footpaths and lanes and then down to the river. The footpaths are absolutely awash with fallen hazelnuts, they're almost ripe but still have green but hardening shells. I know we've had some windy weather over the past 24 hours but there are so many fallen nuts and they have all smashed underfoot as people walk the footpath, it's a popular dog walking spot. There are luckily lots of nuts still on the bushes but it's early for them to be coming down in numbers. Looking at the foliage on the trees and bushes it looks as though we're into an early autumn, the leaves are starting to turn colour and are looking like they're drying up. Is this the same in other parts of the country? We have bumper crops of hawthorn, rowan, conkers and blackberries this year but they are small and hardly swollen due to lack of rainfall and only just beginning to colour up and ripen, nowhere near ready to harvest yet. Our homegrown apples on the big old tree are starting to crack and split I think due to the heavy rainfall we've had a couple of times lately, I'm slightly concerned that the majority of them will be damaged and unuseable or rot on the tree as they are damaged, again is this just us or are other fruit trees doing this? The current predictions are for a hard winter due to the El Nino this year and if old wives know anything then the heavy crops are explained but if we lose the fruit and nuts before they're ripened for one cause or another it will be a bleak old winter and if we do get bad and cold weather the wildlife will really suffer.

It seems to be the same here. There are lots of conkers and acorns, some are falling. But I found my first ripe blackberry today! :eek::eek:

Mojoworking

I've gone to bed I'm tired of feeling cold!!and thinking about plugging the electric blanket in. Definitely feeling like Christmas on July. ........ but for the wrong reasons!!!

thriftwizard

It's like autumn here on the other side of the Forest too; trees losing leaves, small hard fruits that are suddenly splitting due to the downpours. The Met Office have been forecasting "warm settled weather" for the South in "about two weeks" since the middle of June and it hasn't happened yet... First time I looked I thought, oh good, it'll be fine for our festival - and it wasn't. When I checked the night before we went, after the first day (rain) there was supposed to be only a 5% chance of rain, but it rained at some point or other every day and we were under cool, often drizzly, cloud for most of it. I could begin to wonder whether they have the faintest clue what's going on...

More worryingly, the farmers have evidently been taking notice of their forecasts too; there've been lines of hay sitting in the fields being drizzled & rained on. Fodder might be in short supply this winter, unless they're going to make silage with it. And I feel so sorry for the tourists; we were in one of the lovelier parts of Dorset on Sunday, and the local supermarket was full of grizzling, damp children and tired-eyed parents muttering, "It is due to get better tomorrow, isn't it?" but it hasn't been...

GreyQueen

Thanks for the tip, BB, I'm good for FB pies atm. Possibly over-stocked, even. They're widely-available at £1, even FFoodius which briefly put them up to £1.19 (19% hike!) has put them down to £1 again.

nuatha, fingers crossed that whatever it is, is the least-worst of the possible options, and fixable.

I'm somewhere is southern England, I like to keep it a bit vague, but suffice to say between MrsLW and the Midlands. We've got rowan trees starting to show their orange berries and several other trees are turning colour and starting to drop a few leaves. We're past the hinge of the year and the allotment is definately getting that gone-over look, although some crops aren't ready yet, and some are finished and gone.

If the weather turns dry, I shall be having the family up this Friday for our personal potato harvesting festival. We shall also pick the last of the spring-sown broad beans and have those stalks up. I'm bundling them this year, with natural fibre string, so I won't contaminate my soil when I burn them in the bundles. I'll wait until they're good and dry and then wrap them in a tarp until the beginning of October when the burn ban comes off.

Frustratingly, the best and most efficient, least-smoky time for burning stuff is summer, when it's not allowed. I compromise by planning my bonfire carefully and gathering the materials, storing some smaller ones in the shed like the broad bean dried pods, and then going for it on the first dry, windless day after 1st October.

My spud harvest is pretty late but the tops don't normally have time to dry off entirely before we're fighting with blight and having to get the tops off and away. This year, I have had only a single email warning of one Full Smith Period in my postcode off the FAB/Blightwatch website. Tell ya, bearing in mind how saturated everything is, if it suddenly gets hot again, we'll have a major blight problem.

I'm not liking the way things are going in Greece at all, and was watching a short news clip on FerFAL's blog which was featuring the life in retirement of a former Police officer. He and his son & dil live together and have essentially reverted to a peasant economy, as have many of his fellow villagers. Small livestock, veggie gardening, hardly any cash transactions. But this isn't going to be possible for an urban population, although I have even heard of some people giving up on Athens and other large places to go back to the villages where their families used to live, to see if they can scratch a subsistance living there. Grim.

Saw the same phenomenon in southern Spain a few years ago, between Malaga and Granada in the Sierra Nevada. People who'd moved to northern Spain for factory work many years ago, and who were now long-term unemployed, had returned to rebuilt their tiny and long-derelict family homesteads, and try to survive there.

We live in interesting times, and not in a good way.

ivyleaf

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Hi NUATHA hope you're OK and that tests and possibly more tests come to a conclusion for you that improves life even if it does precipitate a career change. Hope MIL is continuing to make progress and improve and that you and Mrs. Nuatha are both coping with the extra caring that MIL needs. Stay strong my friend, thinking of you all, Lyn xxx.

Seconding what Lyn said Thinking of you nuatha xxx

1Tonsil Thoughts are with you too, I hope you are able to get sorted out and the banks get sorted too!

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

I'm not liking the way things are going in Greece at all, and was watching a short news clip on FerFAL's blog which was featuring the life in retirement of a former Police officer. He and his son & dil live together and have essentially reverted to a peasant economy, as have many of his fellow villagers. Small livestock, veggie gardening, hardly any cash transactions. But this isn't going to be possible for an urban population, although I have even heard of some people giving up on Athens and other large places to go back to the villages where their families used to live, to see if they can scratch a subsistance living there. Grim.

Saw the same phenomenon in southern Spain a few years ago, between Malaga and Granada in the Sierra Nevada. People who'd moved to northern Spain for factory work many years ago, and who were now long-term unemployed, had returned to rebuilt their tiny and long-derelict family homesteads, and try to survive there.

We live in interesting times, and not in a good way.

Spain has limited unemployment benefits that end after two years and Greece has none. So the impact is that you are no longer any benefit to the economy. Right wing politicians will tell you that it motivates them to get work (if there is any). At least here you can
ride out the bumps in the economy but for how much longer?

I do see significant problems ahead as the government will portray the problem as too generous benefits yet the problem is poor wages particularly at the bottom of the income scale. You have to rely on in work benefits to pay extortionate housing and child care costs, and are penalised if one person stays home to do child care. So the government make it seem that benefits are too high when the reality is that wages are too low.

Over the next decade or so I suspect that wages will be kept low to aid productivity and company profits but do little for personal incomes of all but the very rich. It will be the middle classes that are in line for culling next time around. Yet too many think that they are doing well and yet many are so very close to financial oblivion, and do not realise it. The next recession will shake a few more out of that delusion and the same every recession after.

moneyistooshorttomention

Must admit would like to know the reasoning behind "its the middle classes that will be culled next"??

Though - on a salary level - I have long noticed that the type of office job I did, for instance, was/is gradually being mechanised out of existence. Add that the terms of employment are often not what they were (existing workers on standard office hours, but new ones put onto 8-8 including weekends type contracts).

Is that what you mean? Or are you including professional jobs as well?

Frugalsod

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

Must admit would like to know the reasoning behind "its the middle classes that will be culled next"??

Though - on a salary level - I have long noticed that the type of office job I did, for instance, was/is gradually being mechanised out of existence. Add that the terms of employment are often not what they were (existing workers on standard office hours, but new ones put onto 8-8 including weekends type contracts).

Is that what you mean? Or are you including professional jobs as well?

Yes your job will either be outsourced to Asia or automated out of existence. Many middle class jobs will simply disappear. You only have to see in the US how middle class incomes have been stagnant for 40 years, and how all the gains are going to supervisors and bosses, but even the supervisors will find things tougher as they have fewer people to manage. It is basically an erosion of all incomes starting with the low paid and slowly working its way up the income scale. You only have to see how many unemployed law graduates there are in the US to see how bad things are even further up the income scale.

[Deleted User]

1 Tonsil, DD1 suggests the following possibility. As you have family in the UK and a UK bank account with money in it, how about giving family in the UK access to that account (online, debit card etc) or opening a joint account at the same bank. They could then use it for western union money transfer possibly to Corfu if supported (worth checking whether that would be released?) or to Italy/Albania wherever is easier to get to. They can transfer £1000 or more at a time in Euros and all that is needed is the transfer code and ID to collect it.
It wouldn't be accessing a Greek account and therefore should not be subject to Greek banking codes unless it is then put into a Greek bank.
She used Western Union in Morocco on a school expedition when there was a problem with cash (not enough issued) and received £1300 in local currency on production of ID at a Western Union point. They are widespread and easy to use.
Just a thought.