The Minister finding out about the Carers Passport

The photograph above shows Jill Rundle, the Carers Passport Coordinator for the Fund and myself meeting the Minister for Health Michael McGimpsey at a recent Carers Convention held in Castle Buildings Belfast. The Minister was very interested in the work of the Fund and seemed particularly interested in the work we do with Carers.

There are growing numbers of people approaching the Fund for help with their caring duties. Research carried out on behalf of Carer's Week shows that over 6 million people across the UK are carers, of which half will be juggling their caring responsibilities with their work. Based on that research, we estimate that there could be as many as 30,000 civil servants in this position in all of the UK.

What Will Carer's Passport Do?

Carer’s Passport is designed to provide them, and their line managers, with a full set of information about their needs in the workplace and to identify solutions to those needs, whether financial or otherwise. Ideally, the passport will stay with the employee should they be transferred across the department, would be available to any new line manager so they can instantly see their responsibilities, and any solutions previously agreed between the employee and their former manager.

How Does Someone Apply?

Anyone wanting to know more about Carer's Passport, particularly to see if it's something they might qualify for, should e-mail Jill Rundle, Carer's Passport Project Manager. We've seen plenty of examples where applicants to the Fund could have benefitted from Carer's Passport.

In my own experience of individuals in Northern Ireland who have spoken with Jill and received their Carers Passport, there is a real sense of support and relief, knowing that they now have tangible recognition of the work they do and 'something to show' if anyone wants to discuss their situation. In some cases, individuals may never have shared their home responsiblities with anyone at work and the Carers Passport may give them the voice to do so. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you think you would benefit from talking about this great scheme.

You don't HAVE to spend it, you know

My last 2 posts looked at the two main areas of the money pyramid: Your essential housing costs which should account for about 30% of household income and your neccesary spending which should account for up to 50% of income. We now move on to that elusive last section, the non-essential spending. This will include things like gym membership, socialising, unsecured debt and the miscellany of life. This should roughly be about 20% of your income.

The psychology of debt means that you should approach your finances in this order, you need to be sure that these areas of expenditure come after everything else is paid and in good order. If you feel that you are spending well out of the proportions I have mentioned here, you can either contact me directly for advice or contact one of my Fund colleagues on 0800 056 2424. I will be covering methods of dealing with debt in the coming weeks, so you might also want to wait for that post if you feel it's not urgent.

If you've been following the posts, you know that I believe that every penny we bring into the household is a prisoner and is only released for the best of reasons! I have no issue at all with spending money and for me to say otherwise would be hypocrisy. However, what I have learned over the years is to make sure that if I spend it, I have it in the first place and to be more careful about planning for events and expenditures. We have cultivated a 'must have' culture and we no longer are able to wait to consume the goods we want, be it a car, new phone or holiday. I don't think that we can re-cultivate this mind set overnight, but it's worth remembering if something is worth having, it's worth waiting for.

Control of your finances is the key issue in all of my threads, and this spreads to this area. If you have a gym membership, do you know how much it is and do you use it? Have you checked the best price for your broadband, cable and telephone packages? Do you need a landline or could you save money using mobile broadband?

When we reach this stage of financial scrutiny, people will often cry that they have done everything I suggested and on paper they have a surplus of £200 a month that seems to disappear before the next payday comes. I have long ascribed this disappearing money to the Evil Money Fairy who comes by at night when you sleep and takes £20 notes from your purse. The only way of trapping and humanely catching the Evil Money Fairy is to keep a spending diary for at least a week and preferably a month. Put all your ATM reciepts into your diary and try to make a note of where you spend the money. You'll be surprised at how many times you take money out for milk and you won't convince me it costs £20 per litre. Scrutinise your bank statement and be confident that you know what each and every transaction stands for.

In short, start to take full and total control of your money and let it know that you are the boss if it and your money is not the boss of you.

Next time, I want to look at how households manage money and some good techniques to control direct debits. After that, I will look at debt before moving on to savings, insurance and pensions.

To spend or not to spend

Thanks for the feedback I have been getting from you, both in phone calls and via e-mails. I have had one or two queries that I have answered for people directly, but I hope to be able to answer them directly here, once I get this series of Money Matters articles out of the way.

In my last post, I looked at the beginnings of starting a budget or a monthly list of income and expenditure that you can use to establish control over your household finances. If you have all been good boys and girls, I hope you now have this list and consult it regularly! As I often say in my talks, I didn't come across these methods by accident. I was a single parent who raised 3 children alone, so every penny mattered to me when I had a full house. I worked off a strict budget and got into the habit of looking at my spreadsheets and bank statements almost every day and I found it an excellent way to stay in control.

Today I wanted to look more closely at spending. We spend for all sorts of reasons, from neccesity to frivolity and all points in between. Sometimes we spend in the belief it will cheer us up or we might buy something to demonstrate to someone else just that we can afford to. I ask people to be wary of this 'L'Oreal factor'. I know you are worth it, you know you are worth it, but really can you afford it? Affordabilty needs to be the cornerstone of your purchases and the idea of reward, treat, conspicuous consumption or anything else needs to be put aside. Treat yourself in other ways and find ways that don't cost money.

To further break down spending, I will refer to the pyramid I used in the last post. I broke household spending into 3 categories that are simply for guidance or reference and not for slavish adherence or to cause anxiety.

In that diagram, you will see that I have determined that household costs including rent, mortgage, Council Tax or Rates should be about 30% of total household income. It makes sense that the more income or incomes into a household, the more achievable this figure is going to be and that households with one individual are probably going to exceed that figure and edge closer to 50 or 60%. If you are spending more than 60% of your take home pay on your housing costs, it is going to be difficult for you to meet your other out-goings comfortably. If this is the case, you might want to consider renting a room, sharing a house or finding cheaper accommodation if you rent.

For people with mortgages, no matter where you stand on the expenditure line, you should confidently know what kind of a mortgage you have, what rate you have and what kind of period you are tied in to if it is fixed. Better men than me regularly debate whether or not interest rates will rise and how much mortgage interest will then rise. I am loathe to tell people to leave or stay with their tracker mortgages, but I do feel that you should be fully informed and make your choice based on that information. Although your bank may not advise a specific product, they are very willing and able to explain the different mortgages on the market, the implications of each one and you should take advantage of that.

Council Tax or Rates in Northern Ireland are a painful topic for everyone and there is little good news there. However, in England and Wales if you live alone you will be eligible for 25% discount. In Northern Ireland that applies only to people over 70. However, Rate rebate in NI became a little more accesible a couple of years ago so you should definitely make enquiries if you are disabled, a Carer or on low income as help may be available.

Moving past housing costs, the next tranche of spending we do as a household should be about 40% of our income on essential goods. This includes insurances, food, housekeeping, utilities and transportation costs. I advise people to take this list very slowly and make sure you are paying the most competitive amounts possible for each of these items. Once you start working on it, a lot of progress can be made over the course of a year.

If we start with insurance, you should know exactly how much you are paying for each policy and be very certain about what every single policy is for. Insurance is good, too much or incorrect insurance is a waste of money. Many people take out Building and Contents insurance when they take out a mortgage, but this may prove to be more costly than an open product. Look at comparison sites, such as moneysupermarket.com or gocompare.com. For civil and public servants you should certainly consider getting a quote from our good friends at Civil Service Insurance Society.

Utilities are next for the examination and again you should be sure you are paying by the cheapest method and getting the best deal. Interestingly, a good way to save money on utilities is making sure you house is in order! By this I mean that your loft insulation is up to date, you have good thick curtains (that you pull closed) for the colder months and that you switch to energy savings bulbs. You can do an on-line audit at Energy Savings Trust. It never ceases to surprise me how much money people report back at having saved once they undertake these measures. And without wishing to sound like my father, the best way to make sure you aren't paying for electricity is to turn off lights when they aren't being used or use a side lamp in the evening. If you have a problem with 'teenager electricity syndrome', think about installing a meter or use an OWL to monitor usage.

Food and housekeeping is an interesting area and certainly one where we spend a significant proportion of our budget. The internet has literally millions of sites dedicated to ways of saving money here and there is no doubt it's worth being mindful of. Personally, I try to be mindful of waste and certainly look for ways of extending the use of foodstuffs. It's an area of personal preference, but it is certainly one worth keeping in mind and knowing how much you spend every week per person per household.

Finally in this part of the spending review, we look at transport. At my Whitehall presentation last month, one of the attendees told us that she had recently sold her car, bought a bike and cancelled her gym membership. It was a win/win situation for her as she saved money, found a way to keep fit and cut back on spending. It won't suit everyone, but don't be shy about looking at carpools, park and ride or taking public transport and monthly tickets to save money.

In my next post, I will look at the base of my spending triangle and discuss different ways of dealing with spending on debt and think about ways to become debt free.

Part 1: Budgeting and Managing your money

For many people, money is a background issue to life. It comes in, it goes out and very often problems aren't appreciated or reconised until that terrible day when your card goes into the ATM machine and the machine says 'NO'!At that point, people will wonder why there is more month than money and sadly too often will then go on to borrow from friends, family or one of the on-line sites with horrendous interest rates. Over the years at the presentations of Money Matters that I have given, I have been surprised that the number of people who manage their money with a monthly budget is quite low, probably less than 10%. A budget is quite simply a list of all your incomings on one side and your outgoings on the other side. It should provide a picture of whether you have enough money coming in to meet your needs or whether there is a problem with your expenditure. No matter how well off we think we are, a budget is an essential tool for gaining control of your money and remaining in control. If we don't have enough money to meet our bills, we can look at our outgoings and see if they can be reduced, or if things are worse than that, we can recognise the size of the problem and take steps to get help. If there is more coming in than going out, it's time to plan, set goals and decide on how to make the most of saving.

People have found this simple diagram very useful when trying to figure out where they sit on the traffic light for budgets, so take some time to look at this as well. In setting up your budget, you can take a simple pen and paper approach to it, but in my experience a spread sheet is probably the best way to approach it. You keep your income on the left side, and generally this is a stable figure. Include all your income such as salary, partner's salary, tax credits, child benefit and disability allowances. It's a good time to make sure you are mazimising your income and making sure you have the correct tax code and receiving any benefit you are entitled to. This is also a good time to review who lives in the house and what they are contributing. With the big increase in adult children returning home to live, it's worth having an adult conversation to discuss a reasonable contribution to the household. I know that this is an issue many people shy away from, and parents particuarly feel that they should be able to 'provide' for their children. Another way of looking at this is that we need to make sure children understand the value of goods and that giving them free bed and board for life doesn't really help in their fuller understanding of the personal financial world. On the other side of your spresdsheet, list your outgoings for the month. It is useful to have your bank statement to hand for this, as there may be items you forgotten or amounts you need to check. We can look at spending in terms of priority spending that includes housing costs, transport costs and food/ housekeeping and then non-priority spending which includes cards, unsecured debts and non-essentials like gym membership, SKY TV and so on. Again, I have devised a little diagram below that people find useful:

I would normally split expenditure into 2 columns for essential and non-essential spending, just to give an idea of where things sit at the time and to be sure there is enough income to meet the essentials.

Once you have all this information, you will know where you sit on the traffic light diagram for earlier. In the next post, I will start breaking down those areas and look at ways of managing money depending on where you stand in relation to your position.

History of Women in the Civil Service

For anyone with an interest in history, please have a look at the Civil Service Live on-line exhibition of Women in the Civil Service. This was the exhibition organised last year for the event in the London Olympia and we've mentioned it a couple of times on the Fund website in the meantime. However, the full set of photos, images and script is now on the site and is a worthwhile read. For people of a certain age, including myself, I have clear memories of friends and family memebers who worked in the Civil Service but who had to resign because of the Marriage Bar. I have been very surprised at the number of women and indeed men who are quite shocked at the idea that women used to have to resign their post on marriage. One of the more interesting files found in the Archives during the research for the project was the 'Jilted Engagement' file. This existed for women who had resigned prior to their wedding day but were stood up either at the altar or at some point en route. They had to make a special application to be consdiered to have their posts back. We were able to make sure the Fund was well represented on the time line, so do look out for us, beginning in 1886 when the Fund started, a mere 125 years ago.

Money Matters at International Women's Day

The 100th anniversary of International Women's Day was celebrated across the world on March 8th this year and I was delighted to have been invited to Whitehall for the occasion.

Over the past 3 years, I have been delivering one-hour sessions on positive money management throughout the Northern Ireland Civil Service, with about 100 sessions delivered now to just under 3,000 serving officers. The talks have been really well received with excellent feedback. I was asked to deliver a session for Home Office Women in January this year, which then led to the invite for IWD. Once again, the feedback was exceptionally positive for the session and the attendees found it to be very useful, practical and relevant to their daily lives.

I thought it might be useful to deliver an 'on-line' version of the presentation over the course of 4 sessions covering the essential elements of Positive Money Management. Over the next 4 contributions I will look at 1. Budgeting and Control of Money 2. Savings and Investments 3. Pensions and planning for the future 4. Insurance and Comparison shopping.

There are 2 manin factors to the background of these Money Matters presentations that are worth explaining in a little detail. Since the Liberalisation of Financial Services in the late 1980's more people have had more access to more money and financial products than ever before in history. The range and availability of financial products burgeoned in a short space of time and individuals were making some decisions that they had never been asked to consider before. It took quite a while for the powers that be to recognise that in addtion to the provision of this awesome display of choice, people MIGHT need just a little guidance and education about those choices.

The Consumer Financial Education Body or CFEB is now the main body for the development and management of financial capability in the UK. The presentations that I referred to earlier were largely based on and run in conjunction with the FSA Money Made Clear programme that was launched in 2008. So you can see that there is great interest and investment in the general area of personal financial capability.

However, my own interest went further than that! I have worked with the Fund for 12 years now and many of the people that I worked with seemed to have problems making ends meet, although in theory they shouldn't have been in that position. I wanted to develop a bespoke programme that was relevant and informative for civil servants and also made sure that the Fund was an integral part of these presentations.

The Fund is here for all civil servants, for life and what better way to work in partnership with individuals than to inform, educate and excite them about managing money! In the next installment, we will look at the basics of Money Management, including understanding income and expenditure, creating a household budget and setting traps for the Money Fairy. See you soon

Back to blogging

Well, it's been quite a while since I visited my site, and my apologies for anyone who came along in the meantime. The months of December and January are traditionally the very busiest for the Fund, and everything else takes a bit of a back seat to the business of helping our clients.

In speaking to my clients, people seem to have been very affected by the general messages of doom and gloom that are abundant at the moment. There is no doubt that the economic difficulties remain real and present, and probably unprecendented. But on a personal and individual level we can remain in control.

In fact, remaining in control of our personal financial life is probably a really good way to try and insulate yourself from what you are hearing every day. There are so many things that we are unable to control, but if we can remain in charge of our budgets and household economies we will stay ahead of the game.

I spoke a little about this late last year, but perhaps its time to repeat the message. I firmly believe that each household should have a firm idea of how the money is managed within it. Households can vary very significantly in composition, but it should hold that if someone is able to contribute financially, they should be doing so. I often meet parents who are struggling to manage to put food on the table but are too nervous or ashamed to ask their working chidlren who are still living at home to contribute. I appreciate that the kids may be saving for the future, but I am also fairly certain that open and honest communication about the costs of every day living is more useful than pretending that everything is OK and becoming stressed.

There are really two positions to be in at the moment. Either you have been affected financially through the loss of an income, or you haven't. If you are in the position of being directly affected, there is no excuse not to look for guidance from an experienced adviser as soon as possible. You may have savings and insurance policies to help you over a period of time, but an objective overview of your personal situation might also be very helpful. An advier may also help you to negotiate with your bank or creditors while you are going through a difficult period.

In the context of my work, I am finding it pretty common for women in the civil service to have husbands who have lost work in the building trade or other industry and are suffering from the loss of income. I have spent quite a lot of time over the past couple of weeks helping families such as this to make arrangements to keep their head above water for as long as possible.

The second category of people are those who are still working, but have been affected by the uncertainty that is percolating. I've been doing 1-hour lunch time sessions at various civil service locations since last December on Money and Budgeting advice. The sessions cover looking at your present and future requirements and provide advice on how to best manage your finances. My next set of presentations will be in Dundonald House on February 25th, so if you want any details just let me know. Those sessions are largely based on the FSA workshops, but adapted for the Civil Service. I may have mentioned it before but the best website for information is the one run by the FSA.

As always, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly as so many of you are doing.