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Browsing tag: economy

  • December 11, 2008

    Displeasure……warning, rant!

    So Bollard’s called for electricity providers, among other companies, to drop their prices.

    Not likely! We just had our power prices increase last month and I don’t see our company reversing that right now.

    The boy’s car loan rocketed 2% in the course of a few months as interest rates bounced around. Now that the OCR’s fallen to 5%, there’s been absolutely no decrease in his interest rate (I think it was around 7.5 when he first took it out).

    coin

    I’m not impressed with Vodafone. If we had any other options other than Telecom, Id be changing in a jiffy. Not only are they charging to send out paper statements (doesn’t apply; we’re on prepay), they’re charging $1 just to speak to a human CSR. Ha! What a joke. Everyone knows it’s damn near impossible to even get through to a person, let alone charge us for it! You can call their service line on 0800 from a land line phone, but wait – you still need to have that $1 on your cell phone.

    Of course that doesn’t really work when they f* up and don’t roll your Text 2000 over, resulting in you having zero credit because it all went to texting that should have only cost you $10. So when you ring to complain, you’re stuffed, because you can’t afford to speak to them!!!

    And no, topping up is not an option. Don’t even go there. Times are tough, it’s hard enough to top up once a month, let alone any more than that.

    You’ve also just gotta love how they now have $5 IOUs….but charge a 20c fee everytime you use it.
    Now if that doesn’t get your goat what does?

    Now that banks have started charging for basic automated services – how ASB kindly offers to save your bill payee’s info for next time, for a $2 fee – looks like everyone else will be too.

    Come on telecomms competition!

  • October 30, 2008

    Crappy work situation

    Things are kinda depressing at the moment. The boy has been going to work and regularly getting sent back home (about half the time). There’s just no jobs happening at the moment, and if no one’s contracting them, he’s got no work to do. Having your income almost halved is somewhat inconvenient.

    What can we do? Could try and find another job. It sure wouldn’t be in the same field – it’s dead out there (except possibly in the South). Could spend this time retraining and go into IT or something. the reason we’re trying to stick it out, and have been for months, is he’s due to start his apprenticeship. or he was about four months ago, but with all the upheaval of staff apprenticeships have definitely fallen into the ‘not a priority’ category. Apparently it will right itself after New Year, and things will be back on track and he can start getting accredited, but that’s still a bloody long time away. Another 10 weeks of going in only to be told to go home, and do nothing. Thank Christ Monday was a stat holiday.

    It would be ideal if he could do some kind of odd jobs on the days he has off. Still thinking on that one…

  • October 23, 2008

    The R word

    Yay, recession.

    It bugs me that over the last few months as interest rates soared, the rates on loans soared in kind. Yet now they’re starting to fall, I’m not seeing a corresponding drop. Surely it has to come sometime. And yet the rate on my Fastsaver plunged, literally a day or two after the OCR cut announcement.

    Things are going bad at the boy’s company. He’s getting sent home every week because there’s no work for them. Which is all fun and games since he gets heaps of downtime to mess around in, until the week after when his pay packet’s a helluva lot thinner. especially considering that he’s paying down debt at the moment, every dollar counts. we really need his full pay, more preferably. everything extra helps. and with the car needing a warrant this week, god knows how much repairs are going to cost. bloody money suckers. I know how it bores him to stay at work cleaning and doing crap stuff, but as long as he can stand it, as long as he can wring something out of it, it’s gotta be done. But when he’s got to stand around waiting for a “possible” job to crop up, all the while unpaid (they have to allocate their timesheets by jobs so the company can bill their clients) he may as well go home and chill out, hang out with people, clean and do chores (ha, yeah right).

    We had the joy of having a meeting today about “cutbacks” (first time I’ve ever seen the editor in persn). I now know how many staff we have too, and it’s fewer than we think. Soon to be a few less, with a handful of redundancies on the cards (not in our department fortunately). I guess getting laid off happens to a lot of people, but it’s never really hit close to home before.

    Guess it’s not the best time to ask for a raise…

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