₦airaland Forum

jadepinkett:
http://amex.co.uk/refer/cHINWN7Jmu?XL=MNANS

Plugging in my Amex referral. You get 10,000 avios on sign up when you spend up to £1k in 3 months

Ah! Who used my code? Thank you ooo...

Please, sign up with my referral.
Push a sister forward
http://amex.co.uk/refer/cHINWN7Jmu?XL=MNANS

http://amex.co.uk/refer/cHINWN7Jmu?XL=MNANS

Plugging in my Amex referral. You get 10,000 avios on sign up when you spend up to £1k in 3 months

Hi. Does anyone have any idea of the interest free period on Amex? I think some banks give up to 3 months to clear up your credit before tacking on interest.
Is this applicable to Amex?
[quote author=mex551 post=112836359]Which merchants accept Amex?
There are now more than 35,000 U.K. retailers that accept payment by an American Express card. Here are some of the key places. Note that these are the places where you are most are likely spend the majority of your money:

Goto cards and select it. See the options it gives you. On Revolut, I know generating cards is via the card option, so try it out on this app.

Viruses:
This is it, nothing like digital card. The only option for card is to make an order. Can you provide further guidance please?

With Revolut free account, you can have a virtual card that would serve the same purpose as your ATM. You also have the option to generate a disposable virtual card. Revolut made me not to know this country's currency cos I rarely carry cash

Hwy9:
Please, what location is this? Seems high for a single occupant. My energy bill for April was approx £50 and I use electric only ( Even me I am still in shock). March bill was approx £60. Ctax should be between £80 to 100 for single occupancy. My water bill is less than £20. This is for Wales. Location and usage are key drivers.

Ha! Nice one. I understand Wales is super affordable in comparison with most cities in the UK. You really lucky

Solumtoya:
Yup, no two situations are same. Sure you already know your monthly costs for Feeding, Transport, Phone, Miscellaneous... So the new ones will be Energy (could be £80 to £350 especially if it's Electric Heating, Gas Heating is way cheaper), Council Tax (£130 ish), Broadband (£20 ish), Water (depends on usage, maybe £25 since you're alone), TV License (£32), that should be it really. It's all in the Energy bill! Thankfully, you can control that.

P.S.: With your name, I bet Will Smith could pay for it all.

Thank you.
I don't mind a direct connect to Willie though.

This energy bills be scaring me. Always stayed in a shared apartment, all bills inclusive but seriously considering setting up on my own.
So if I were to get a 1 bed apartment with good EPC rating, can anyone give me a rough estimate on what to expect on bills? Water, gas/electric, council tax etc...

I know that no two situations are alike but an estimate will help me prepare budget

Viruses:
The city is OK. There are Nigerian supermarkets.
You don't really need to pay more than one month rent.

Oh, thanks. What is cost of living like? Any social life or activities? I'm currently in the UK but in SE. Accommodation is expensive here, but don't want to jump in blind. At least, here I can easily get to London, will not be the case if I move

Lexusgs430:
That town is in an entanglement.........

Can you clarify �

Hello. Are there people living in Leicester here? How is the town? Is there accessible naija foodstuff?

Hi. Can you share a link where we can get more info on this and possibly start an investment?

Ticha:
Pension and wealth planning for the future - very long read.

To access full pensions, we have to pay 35 years of national insurance to access the full state pension in the UK and in New Zealand, a naturalised Kiwi aka us has to pay at least 10 years of income tax. It means we can't access the full state pension in both countries.
In both places, I doubt if we could live on the pension anyway even if we qualified for it. The full UK pension is about £7k a year so £14k for both of us. Yes, you could potentially access other benefits, but it means from age 65 for women and 67 for men, you’ll be living on approx. £1k a month unless you have savings to draw on. If you have savings of more than £16k, you also can’t access any state benefits either. So we have been planning for retirement.

We have a Global Vanguard All Shares account (the name has changed over the years) - managed by Henderson Securities. We've had it jointly for more than 12 years (husbot for much longer) and have dipped into it sometimes (mainly to pay for IVF). We haven't touched it for years now and the funds have grown exponentially. If we continue paying into it consistently, we should have about £600k worth of shares (yay compound interest) by the time I'm 55 and husbot is 52. To give an idea, we've always paid a minimum of £150 each monthly into it since 2010. Henderson does the investing and taxes on our behalf. We haven't bothered to check what they invest it in, but we picked an aggressive growth fund for a long time and that really paid off (hence using the profits for IVF). Now it's in a mid-range growth fund and will remain there. We have upped our monthly minimum payments to £250 each a month now because we can afford to do so. The SOA comes every March, but we don’t check it or even look at it beyond seeing how much is there when the SOA comes.

In New Zealand - we pay into the government Kiwisaver scheme (pension scheme). I contribute 3% of my earnings and husbot contributes 5% of his earnings, the government contributes $521 every year. We can withdraw our Kiwisaver once we've been out of NZ for 12 months (6 years of payments), so we plan to withdraw it and dump it into Henderson when we leave.
Onto tangible assets – We have property in both countries. I sold my house in 9ja once I realised it was an albatross and put all the funds into a UK purchase. Our UK family home although rented out is on a full repayment mortgage. Thanks to the current property boom (which can also go bust!) we have some substantial equity in it. We also have other BTLs on interest only mortgages. We can always sell one to clear off the mortgage on the family home if needed.

The move to New Zealand has been the best thing for us financially. I have no employer loyalty. No one goes into education to make money as the pay is poor compared to the level of work and qualifications involved. I often jump ship every 2 years because that's the only way I can increase my wages. Wages in education are much higher in NZ than in the UK which is weird (5m v 67m) but good for me!
Anyhow, when we moved to NZ, we took opportunity of the higher wages and saved and saved and saved but buying a house seemed out of our reach. Then we met another couple who seemed to have the same values as us (family, financial, moral you name it). We pooled our resources and we bought a house in our name (we bought first because we had higher incomes and better credit). With property values going crazy, we within 6 months refinanced that property and gifted the cash to this family (basically paid them back their initial contribution and extra) so they bought one too in their name. They then refinanced and gifted us the cash and we bought another in our names.
Because we want to exponentially grow the money, we are demolishing the first house to build 5 new ones and then leverage that to give them enough to buy a 2nd property for themselves. They can choose to develop or hold or sell but we will have both walked away with 2 initial properties each.

It does mean we're financially tight until we finish the build March/ April 2023 (build starts in Oct 2022) but it's for our future financial security so we're totally happy to have a few tight years. It also means I can't help my extended family as much as I used to and boy! am I hearing about it! I've thoroughly enjoyed the consent and planning process for the development. We now have land use consent ad have just applied for building consent. It has been stressful and a huge expenditure but also a big learning curve. I almost decided to retrain as surveyor last year when we got the engineering bill ��. When the houses are completed, it'll be leased to Housing New Zealand on a 5 year repairing lease. The income from the 5 after tax is about the same as my before tax income (imagine fa) so we know we can comfortably live on that should shit hit the fan workwise.

Our current NZ home was bought with retirement in mind. We went for the biggest house on a large land. We also deliberately bought in a medium density zone. Basically, we can build up to 6 four bedroom houses on the land if we demolish the existing house. If we decide not to retire in New Zealand, then that is what we would do in about 7 years’ time. If we choose to retire in NZ (I seriously doubt it) then we'll sell the UK family home and pay off the mortgage on the NZ one. It has bedrooms and a full bathroom downstairs and is disabled friendly – no stairs to access the whole of the ground floor. I have no intention of going into a nursing or care home.

Shareswise - we've now opened targeted growth fund accounts for the children with Lansdown Hargreaves. We pay £100 a month into each child's account. They will get full access at 18. Hopefully, they can use that to pay uni fees, supplement apprenticeship wages, down payment on a house or even go traveling before uni/ work starts.

We have also created a family trust. I look at the truly wealthy and what they have for going for them is generational wealth and good financial planning. In my family, I'm the first to be in a position to actually start building generational wealth. The trust will hopefully go on forever as it's for the direct progeny of my husbot and his siblings (both his siblings have no children and want none) and me and my siblings so it means my nephews and nieces will get payments annually out of it once they hit 21 but their parents can’t access any of the funds. We've currently set it so it can only be dissolved by a court and no beneficiaries can sell assets out of it including us once the asset has been placed in it.

2 reasons we have done this – divorce/ separation for us or our children. Even though we all hope to remain married till death, the truth is that divorce and remarriage happens. The trust is set up to protect the financial interests of all beneficiaries. If either of us divorces, we will continue to be paid out of it. Should any of us re-marry, the spouse will not be able to access any funds from the trust. Same with the children. Stats also show that first generation immigrants usually create the biggest wealth and subsequent generations waste the accumulated wealth. It is very likely that our children will not have the kind of drive we have because they have been born into or have lived in plenty enough to be happy with state handouts in the future. Therefore, they might actually see us as a burden as we grow older and infirm.

So hopefully at retirement, the trust can top up our pension but also ensure we remain at home till end of life and not be a burden on the children.

This is not financial advice. Just sharing what we have done.

Hi. Is there a thread for post study visa? Has anyone successfully gotten the PSW? Anyone rejected (I hope not). Stories, testimonies anything?

All Visa Application Centres in Nigeria has been shut down for 48hrs

mimilyrics:
Yes but they closed at 12.

TheOnly123:
Yes they should still be opened till at least 3/4. Have you received your collection mail?

The tracking moved one step to Transferred to VAC. Still waiting for it to move to the next step, and then collection mail.

Any idea if Ikeja TLS is opened?

Eish, how can we contact TLS to send collection mail na. Since Wednesday decision mail, and till now, no collection

Zoey1:
And Yes I know that.
UK schools don't ask for "Statement of Purpose"
The school, The High Commission NEVER.
UK uses "Personal Statement" that's my point.

Don't be so emphatic on this statement. My school for one asked for statement of Purpose. Other schools I applied to also asked the same. I did not even apply to any that asked for Personal statement.

ebunstic:
494 to £1 for one transaction while the other was 496 to £1. In both instances we paid bank charges of about 15k.

You had a return ticket?

Hello house.
Please after biometrics and I want to pay my fees, can I withdraw from the account. How do I explain this to UKVI? Decision has not yet been made

xander21:
Hi everyone,

Glad to see so many happy stories here. I'm still on mine. I have asked this question before, but havent gotten a clear answer. So I will try again.

My TB Test appointment date is for the 8th of October, I'm tempted to attempt walk-in, say this Friday. In the booking mail, they stated we are not allowed to come unless on the appointment date. Is that a recent directive, or its just standard and we can just attempt walk-in regardless?

Attempt the walk in. Just be prepared to stay the whole day there. They might let you after they are done with the people for that day?

justwise:
That maybe true but those discounted tickets are also available on airline websites if you know what you are doing. Generally nothing you get from agent that will be cheaper than the original source worldwide

You seem to be knowledgeable about your stance. Can you share tips on how to get these discounts? Or can I message you?

TheGuyFromHR:
I use a VPN when buying Lagos to London tickets and change my location from Nigeria to the UK.

Previously you usually get lower prices when you buy your tickets from the UK as opposed to buying from Nigeria, except that you have to pay with your card, which is no longer feasible with Nigerian cards.

In any case, prices on BA's website for 2nd week of October are down to tolerable levels ($410 for a one-way ticket to Manchester/Aberdeen, about 160k), and I just bought earlier today.

$410 is the basic fare I see. By the time you click to check out, taxes et al are included and it rises to about $645. Did you pay $410 today?

mimilyrics:
Monzo: https://monzo.com/i/current-account
Starling: https://www.starlingbank.com/
You open your account from your phone and have your debit card delivered to your address. You can use your BRP, passport or DL when opening. Payment into the account will be via bank transfers or the post office since they don't have brick and mortar outlets. Debit cards arrive in 2-5 working days.

Please what is DL?

utaraji:
I don't know if someone has already asked this question here. I have standard visa application and I want to do walk in 4 days before my interview date and I would also like to pay for priority as well. Can I pay for priority on the day of my walkin as well (42k + 130k)? Or do I have to pay for the priority through online process etc?

Utaraji :
I read this moniker with too much laughter

For someone using a joint account, Is it necessary to get a letter from the co-owner of the account?

naledis:
Haven’t decided on a travel date but the BA fares appear to be from N250,000. They’ll confirm exact fare based on your travel date. Check their Instagram page for more info. That’s where I saw the Student Fare promotion

How do you book BA. I just checked their flight schedule and they do not have flights from Lagos to London.
Even wakanow was upto 500k for this route

I am going from one Australia thread to the other. Can anyone help with the process of visiting visa to Australia? Or which thread covers this?

jadepinkett:
Hi everyone. Is there a thread on how to apply for visit visa in Australia? Can anyone point me to the appropriate junction

Hi. Please can anyone help me with info on visiting Australia. Procedures et al

Akomosule:
Good morning... I have been following for a while and thanks for your help so far.
I am to submit my statement of account by next week and the fall of naira has been scary.. please what would you suggest a person to do in such scenario.. my balance and maintenance fee was to be around 8.5 but I kept 9.1 but with the fall of naira now, I will need to have up to 9.5...

Please can I go ahead and submit or what?
@mimilyrics

If you have money in another account that has sat for 28 days, you can combine accounts. This is what I did because the exchange rate caught up with me quite a while back, and I could not restart my count