SevaTeem

or, rather, the same perfume but at a lower price.

As always, the way to get this is via an online retailer like discountfragrance-online.co.uk who strip away all the expensive demonstrators and fancy chairs and provide you with the same perfume that you could buy in the fancy shops but at a considerably more sensible price.

Of course, in reality you don’t save that much money on such things but what you end up with is a much higher quality of perfume for your money. The only downside is that you can’t make it a last minute thing as you need to allow for a few days in the post.

This recession is turning into a much longer and deeper one than anyone expected which is becoming more visible to a wider range of people as time goes on.

Individual house sales are a fairly rare event for most people so we’re still seeing people putting houses on the market at prices based on a purchase price from a few years ago which, in many cases, was a higher price than the current market will support. That houses won’t sell at these prices is obvious but in many cases the owners simply can’t afford to sell them at the current prices so they add to the collection of “for sale” signs which in turn make things seem a little bit worse as their numbers build. As an example of how far away from the current prices these can be take the example of a house a few hundred yards from me which was bought at the peak of the market at around £300,000 whereas identical houses are now selling (slowly) for around £170,000. Had those people bought on an 80% mortgage they’d need house prices to rise another 40% from their current level just to cover the mortgage.

However, even when houses are priced at an appropriate level that still doesn’t mean that they’ll sell quickly as once a buyer is found and the house is taken off the market it’s quite likely to get the “for sale” sign back as buyers frequently can’t get mortgages: in one local case it took three buyers before reaching one who could get a mortgage.

Sadly all this means that people will be stuck in their houses potentially for decades if they can’t simply write off what could be a substantial loss.

If you’re a young driver then insurance companies are basically going to assume that you’re a bad driver simply because of the statistics.

However, clearly not all young drivers are bad drivers. But if you’re one of the good ones, your problem up to now has been proving it. That’s where technology has finally come in for young drivers car insurance in the form of what’s essentially a consumer version of the device installed in trucks to keep track of the driving habits of the professional drivers.

What this does is to record your driving so it’ll keep track of the length of your journies, your speed, how fast you accelerate and brake, etc. From this the insurance company doesn’t need to assume anything about your driving as they can see exactly how you drive which, hopefully, will lead to lower insurance rates for those young drivers who are good drivers.