Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money. Merryn Webb Somerset

due to some bizarre quirk of fate they have millions of pounds to hand but they need to get it out of Afghanistan, Nigeria or some other distant country. They want you to help them by letting them use your bank account to receive the cash in the UK. In return they will give you a couple of million to keep. The catch? You have to send them some cash first so that they can pay miscellaneous expenses at the other end. You also need to give them all your personal and account details. If you send the cash you will only hear from them again to demand more and if you send your personal details you leave yourself vulnerable in many ways (never give out your personal details: sounds obvious but people do it all the time). The stories told in 419 emails are always topical and often quite convincing (after the tsunami in 2004, for example, I got an email purporting to be from a newly orphaned teenager who needed help getting his parents’ fortune out of Indonesia – see www.419eater.com for many more fantastic examples). But however good these letters sound you should never respond to them: not only is doing so both greedy and illegal but the authors of the letters are criminals.

      Similar fraudsters are involved in the increasingly common eBay/Western Union scam, which works like this. You are selling something online – perhaps a piece of furniture on eBay or a special car on a car sales website such as www.autotrader.co.uk.

      You get a response from someone who wants to buy your goods, say for £5,000. They say they will send you a cheque not for £5,000 but for £7,000. The £5,000 is for you but they then ask that you forward the extra £2,000 on to a friend of theirs via money transfer firm Western Union (the story you are spun is that the friend is to arrange shipping or some such for them). You get the cheque. You deposit it and send on the £2,000. Then you get a call from your bank. What’s happened? You guessed it. The cheque has bounced and you are down £2,000. It’s simple but it works brilliantly. One to be aware of whenever you are dealing online.

      Finally a word on working-from-home scams. You will often see adverts telling you that you can make money addressing and stuffing envelopes at home. But you can’t. If you reply to the ad you’ll be asked for a registration fee. Then you’ll be advised to make money by placing the same ads you replied to around the place. There is no real job – it’s just a way to con you out of your registration fee. Other similar scams involve adverts that offer work assembling things at home. If you respond you’ll be asked to pay upfront for the assembly kit or whatever materials you might be using. You’ll never get it back and you won’t ever get paid for the assembly – your work will be returned as ‘substandard’. The result? They get to keep your deposit. See www.homeworking.com for more detail on how to avoid falling prey to this kind of con, but most of all remember that you should never have to pay to get work. If you do something’s wrong.

       Redundancy

      Losing your job is horrible, however much you hated it, however much you kept wishing on a Monday morning that you would lose it and never have to go again. The fact is that being told you are surplus to requirements is a huge blow to your self-esteem. You’ll be shocked, you’ll be angry and you’ll be hurt. But above all you’ll be dealing with the fact that you no longer have an income.

      Statutory redundancy pay is pathetic. Between the ages of 18 and 21 you get half a week’s pay for every year of service. From 22 to 41 you get a week’s pay and from 42 on one and a half weeks’ pay. But this is subject to a maximum of a few hundred pounds a week and you can’t claim for more than 20 years of service. This means that the absolute maximum the law can make your firm give you at the moment is less than £6,000.

      But there is some good news too. The first £30,000 of redundancy pay comes tax free and you are likely to get more than the very basic amount. This means that redundancy does give you an opportunity to rethink your career and even your life. You could take a few months off to retrain and change direction, for example; now might actually be the time to set up your own business! However, the first thing you will need to do is to get your finances in order to make sure you can weather a few months with no income and to rebuild your confidence. Remember that redundancy usually isn’t personal (if you think it is get a lawyer).

      1 Budget. Hopefully you’ll have six months’ worth of money saved up (see Chapter 4) but if not you’ll need to work out how many months you think you could be out of work and budget with your redundancy payment accordingly.

      2 Don’t delay in claiming benefits. You should be able to get a job seeker’s allowance, although this will depend on you having paid enough national insurance over the previous two years. If you haven’t paid enough and are in a bad way you may still be able to get a means-tested allowance. You may also be able to get support for rent, council tax and mortgage costs. See www.dwp.gov.uk, the website of the Department for Work and Pensions, for more detail.

      3 Don’t rush into the first job you get offered. Being without work is frightening but you spend all day every day at work so you need to be sure you end up with something that is at worst bearable and at best actually enjoyable.

      4 Work on your confidence. Make a list of all your skills – not just the ones you have used in your work but all your skills. This will help you to figure out what you have to offer a new employer.

      5 Keep going. Set yourself a few targets every day so you don’t just end up staying in bed.

       WHAT Do I Do Now?

       Find out if you are paid correctly.

       Demand more if you are not.

       Take action if you don’t get it.

       Consider changing jobs or even careers to move yourself up the salary ladder.

       Consider alternative, non-salaried routes to bumping up your income.

       Have the right mindset. If you work hard you do deserve to be paid well.

       Make an effort: it isn’t fair but study after study shows that the well-groomed and slim make more money than the poorly groomed and overweight.

       Read the chapter on investing; this explains how to make your money create more income for you without you having to lift a finger.

       2

       Spend Less, Have More

      Why is it that you never seem to have quite enough cash? Where does all your money go? The answer isn’t that far away. Look in every cupboard in the house and rummage around under the bed. Then take out and collect together every piece of clothing you’ve worn once or never, every pair of shoes you have ever bought in the sales that doesn’t quite fit, every kitchen utensil you’ve never used or used just once (this includes the juicer and the sandwich toaster) and every piece of specialist equipment that has been gathering dust since you decided your new hobby wasn’t much fun after all. Get out your calculator and add up how much you think they all cost. Now you can probably see where a lot of the money went.

      £ 851: the value of the possessions the average British woman carries with her. This includes clothes, mobile phones, MP3 players and so on (Zurich Insurance).

      £ 13,000: the average value of the clothes the average UK woman has bought but never worn (Prudential).

      £ 2,900: the value of the average student’s electronic goods (Direct Line).

      £ 36.6 billion: total sales of clothing in the UK in 2004.

      What’s the point in making all the effort we do to make money if, instead of making it work for us properly, we then just waste it?

      Because that’s exactly what most of us do. Sixty-three per cent of women confess that they have often bought clothes on sale that they have never worn; 56% say they have bought shoes and 42% toiletries they have never used. They also say that on average they wear only about half the clothes in their wardrobe regularly and, worst of all, nearly 8% of them say that they have never worn the most expensive thing they have bought.