Students - are you financially ready?

Many of my friends' children and the young people in my youth group have received their A-level results this summer.

They have all gotten into the Uni or College of their choice - congratulations guys! 

However although they are relishing the prospect of no longer having a bed time or having to eat their greens, little do they know that with adulthood comes responsibility - for their money, their belongings and their financial wellbeing.

Oh yes, lads and laddesses. Your bank account is now your domain, and yours alone. So consider your savings, and protecting your lovely, shiny new belongings. 

A study from Sainsbury's Bank has revealed that students own approximately £3000 worth of possessions in their university accommodation. This makes you a prime target for thieves in some areas, or a disaster waiting to happen.

To wit: in 1995, we watched from an open window in a mate's house, as my mate was on the phone to an ambivalent police force, some students moving into a house just up the road. There was a red van parked around the corner, and as soon as the students were moving in with their enormous boxy TVs and laptops the size of a small car, thieves were running in behind them through the open front door, and taking their belongings into the red van.

Also in 1995, Andre the French Dude's room was turned completely upside-down, and all his belongings were covered in papier mache. I may or may not have had a hand in this. These were the heady days of Tetley Hall in Headingley. Ah.... memories. Anyway the redecoration also included his massive Enigma-style computer, which never completely recovered, nor could the disk drive forgive and forget.

Stolen from Bryony's webpage, her room (note the bottles... ahem)

For a view of one of the rooms, my friend the Rev Bryony Taylor took this pic (left) of her room at Tetley Hall back in the 1990s. Yes, it was before digital cameras were invented, yes I'm old. Get over it ... 

Nowadays there are a lot more electrical items sitting in student accommodation, and a whopping third of students say their possessions aren’t covered by home insurance.

According to Sainsbury's Home Insurance, only 10% of students living away from home have cover on their parents’ home insurance policy.

With 92% of students owning laptops and smartphones, this could be a costly item to replace if there is no appropriate cover. Furthermore, the vast majority (85% of students) say they have a physical collection of books; and the typical value of a student’s bookshelf is now £181.

SO, students - before I write a post about great ways to save for a fun three-four years at uni, please please make sure your parents have checked their home insurance policy to see if Uni accommodation and halls of residence are covered.

If not, conveniently, many providers, including Sainsbury’s Bank, offer protection for student home contents as part of its regular home insurance cover.

Item	Percentage of students who own this	Average value
Laptop	92%	£578
Smartphone	92%	£304
Books	85%	£181
Jewellery	59%	£355
Stereo/music system & speakers / headphones	59%	£112
TV	48%	£254
iPad or other tablet	44%	£299
Cameras	44%	£286
iPod or similar	42%	£124
Sports equipment	37%	£251
Games console	36%	£263
Electronic items - other	29%	£210
Musical instrument e.g guitar	23%	£634
Mobile phone (other)	18%	£159
Desktop PC	17%	£923
E-reader	16%	£89

Source: Sainsbury's Bank

STOP belittling the 'SAHM'

Get the tea ready Mabel, the guests are here. Pic Credit: SimoneySunday

I do not have children (yet) but I already feel the strain of working full time, five days a week (and freelancing Saturdays), as well as various activities and voluntary work throughout the week. This makes it difficult to cook, clean and launder and make sure that something, somewhere in the home is not falling down or getting smothered in dust.

Although I cook every night, I do not always load the dishwasher or wash up afterwards. I might not clean my windows for months. Ironing is a pile I like to play Jenga with. If I struggle with just a husband and a cat, how much more must home-makers struggle to juggle child-raising, cleaning, tidying, budgeting and part-time or home working?

While I have heard comments from (non-married people, generally), saying 'they have it easy' and 'I'd like to lounge around all day watching Jeremy Kyle' in relation to SAHMs and SAHDs, I disagree. I think they do an amazing job.

They deserve a medal! Or actually £19,000 at the minimum - according to Liverpool Victoria (LV= as it is now known).

The life and pension provider recently carried out a survey which found that homemakers work an average of 56 hours a week, not including childcare duties.

Although one in three breadwinners feel stay-at-home role is ‘easy’ (HA! I wonder how many of my SAHM friends would think it's 'easy'??!), the average British household would have to find £364 a week (£19,000 a year, based on the minimum wage) to pay for extra help if the homemaker became ill or injured.

In fact, LV= discovered that the average housewife or househusband has a working week that is 17 hours longer than their at-work partner, if we exclude travel time.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the average number of hours worked by full-time employees a week was 39.2 in 2014 (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, ONS, 2014). This is 16.8 hours a week less than LV's research, which was carried out by pollsters Opinium.

LV= found that full time homemakers spend an average of 56 hours a week covering essential household duties such as cooking and laundry.

What’s more, on average homemakers with children face an additional six hours a day providing childcare.

While cooking (1h 47m), cleaning (1h 45m) and laundry (1h 30m) are the most time-consuming chores, ‘keeping house’ also includes wider tasks such as shopping for essentials (1h 23m), mentoring children with homework (1h 8m), gardening (1h 4m), transporting family members (56m) and other tasks including house admin, including paying bills, managing finances and home improvements (1h 41m).

I'm quite dizzy just thinking about it. But LV= is not just highlighting the importance of SAHMs or SAHD to the overall working of the household.

It is highlighting the fact that most people do not have even £19,000 savings set aside in case of a financial emergency.

People do not even have proper life cover. Yes most people who work for a large or medium sized employer will have some form of life assurance - 3x or 4x salary is a general rule (don't tell the Merman) - but this is only in the event of death. What about unemployment or illness? The State will not support people any longer.

Therefore, it is worth checking out what else your employer offers. It may be that you can have an additional income or critical illness policy through the workplace, though this would be a benefit in kind. Some policies can allow the working partner to take out additional cover for their SAHM or SAHD.

Other life and protection providers could cover individuals against critical illness, injury and inability to work for just £10 a month.

The Seven Families Campaign has been drawing attention to the difference that it can make to everyday people to have proper life cover and critical illness and income protection in place, whether it is because the working partner gets made redundant, or the SAHP (Stay at home Parent) has become too ill to continue making the household function.

It is never too late to start thinking about getting a form of income protection or critical illness cover. Most advisers will be able to direct people in the right direction; at the very least, there are plenty of information sites available online, such as the Citizens Advice Bureau, the Money Advice Service and Seven Families that can help you work out your protection needs.

There's no place like gnome

Hey, how YOU doin?

We journalists get a lot of strange press releases. Mostly they are only odd because they have nothing to do with our line of work.

For example, for three years in a row, the DeutschePost service used to send me emails, in German, outlining new franking machines and ways to mark up commercial post cost-effectively. As interesting as this was, and helpful in expanding my knowledge of German with phrases and vocabulary that nobody, anywhere, outside of the postal service would ever use, it was quite annoying to get ambushed at 9am on a Monday morning by unsolicited and useless information.

But every now and then we get little gems that do have some relevance to our industry, but which seem to have been the brainchild of a slightly twisted genius PR, who is doing a sterling job in trying to make cynical journalists read their company news.

And this one certainly caught my eye. It was about protection. We cover protection. So I was already interested. I saw it was about home insurance - well, I thought, we don't cover home insurance but it is important to read around the subject matter, as it could have an angle for us.

So I opened it, to receive the warning:

"THIS SUMMER, DON’T LEAVE YOUR GNOME UNPROTECTED"

I read it again. I was sure it had said 'home'.

But no. It definitely said 'gnome'. Now I don't know about you but my preference when it comes to garden gnomes is to take a heavy object - a baseball bat, say, or next-doors very ugly dog - and smash these ornaments out of existence. I just don't see the attraction. Garden ornaments such as slender metal herons poised by a pond, or a nice stone sundial, that I can cope with. A gnome, no. They're basically weird, staring albino smurfs that look, from several angles, like ceramic sexual predators. There's no place for a gnome in my home.

And yet here it was in black and white. People are stealing garden gnomes from houses (probably these folk should be thanked and given a mention in the New Year's Honours List) and leaving the gnome-owner out of pocket.

Apparently, in 2014, there were 11,000 incidents of loss or damage to UK gardens, and people were vastly under-insured.

Of this, 5,400 were burglaries. Now why anyone would want to steal this sort of thing is beyond my ken, but they do, and for some reason, people are upset.

Basically, this is how I see all gnomes. 

Some 10 per cent of all home insurance products do not cover your garden, so if someone steals your pot or pots (as appropriate), or pushes Matthew Henderson into the Easton's fish pond, ruining his trainers, their pond and killing all the fish, this is not covered on the home insurance policy. Of course, this is purely hypothetical and bears absolutely no resemblance to any real person or event.*

According to data from John Lewis Home Insurance, people will have to cough up, on average, £1,169 to fix the damage to property and possessions in the garden. For those who put a lot of time and effort into making their outside space pretty, that is a hefty sum to pay.

I do feel sorry for people who have invested time and energy and money into making themselves a beautiful green space, only to see things 'disappear'.

My friend's mother had a little stone Westie stolen from her lawn - a memorial of her little dog - and it was rumoured to have reappeared half a mile down the road in the 'garden' of a traveller camp. Luckily her son is also a police officer and word got out that it was his mother's stone dog that had gone missing. The dog was returned one night, none the worse for its experience.

Another friend had just bought £20,000 worth of beautiful bushes (they cost a lot to grow and maintain to a certain level before purchase), and several of these went missing before he had a chance to install them. I never asked whether his insurance covered the theft, but as he's about as financially literate as a mountain goat, I doubt it.

So what can you do to protect yourself? Well of course you can make sure that your insurance does cover such scurrilous lawn raids.

However, John Brady, head of insurance at John Lewis Home Insurance, also gives these top tips on keeping your garden secure this summer:

● Fix a good quality lock or padlock on the door of the shed, as well as any garden gates.
● Lock belongings in the shed overnight after use (barbecues, bicycles etc.), items left in the garden may not be covered for theft.
● Install automatic security lighting in the garden.
● A prickly hedge around the garden can help to deter intruders.

If all else fails, perhaps you should invest in a gnome. I've heard some of them can be pretty mean.

*This is exactly what happened and I am totally guilty.