Some financial aspects of a European excursion

Greetings from Paris. I am having a brief look at several other economies and financial advisers outside New Zealand.

While visiting our son in London we took a day trip to a small Suffolk town of Stowmarket up near Ipswich.

My wife Lesley's ancestors came from there when they emigrated to New Zealand in 1861 on the Chile through Dunedin, eventually ending up at Riverton.

It was possible to find a distant relation (great, great, great grandfather) in the churchyard.

I noticed a small firm in this town calling themselves financial planners so I asked the one-man band in the one-horse town for some comment.

Unfortunately, his idea of financial planning was selling insurance and locking people into pension schemes.

From my observations of London's economy, little seems to have changed since my 2006 visit. The suits are still travelling with us on the tube at 10 o'clock in the morning to work and the restaurant/wine bar lunches still seem to be going at 2.30 pm, although there are fewer participants.

There are few obvious economic problems; the city is as busy as ever with full trains etc, but papers are full of comments on slow growth and lack of consumer spending.

Before coming here to Paris, I spent a week in Portugal.

As you know, they have been lumped with Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain and referred to as the PIIGS economies.

Where I was staying in a small town on the coast north of Lisbon, there was absolutely no evidence of a problem.

The locals just got on with what they always did and it was very prosperous for them, being the tourist season.

However, in Lisbon it was a different story, where there were closed shops, prolific beggars and many hawkers trying to flog sunglasses, flowers, dodgy bottled water and cheap bangles.

In Portugal, there were many abandoned buildings but my impression was that they were more of a historical nature of at least 50 years or more previously, rather than a result of the recent recession.

It is noticeable that in Lisbon there is much building taking place and the infrastructure from prosperous times, roads in particular, has benefited them with the use of Euroland money.

There were some 140 financial advisers listed in the Lisbon equivalent of yellow pages but I never found any while walking the streets (and I did plenty of that!!).

Everybody has been to Paris so I probably cannot add much more.

It has a very well set out centre and while they are all mad drivers with lots of tooting, I have not seen a single prang.

The number of people wanting to visit the highlights of the city is mind blowing.

Three hours in a queue to get the lift to middle level of the Eiffel Tower and a further three hours queue to the top.

It would have been a total waste of a day, so I settled for a night-time visit.

The queue for the Louvre was interesting and well organised. From the start of queuing at 8.45am for opening at 9am we were inside at 9.20am after making a rough head count of 625 persons ahead of us.

That equates to about 1500 an hour at 9.5 (NZ$24), and that times nine hours six days a week is about 4.1 million euros a year.

There was another 50-minute queue at the Palace of Versailles but it was worth it.

I am now about all museumed out, what with all the other notable churches and Napoleon's tomb etc, etc.

Off now to Brittany and a ferry crossing to Plymouth to check out the tourist trade of Devon and Cornwall.

I can find no comment about New Zealand in any local papers but am keeping up to date with internet providers home pages.

I expect to be able to make some more in-depth comment in my next column once I have analysed all the financial newspapers I am accumulating.

(I am being reminded occasionally that I am on holiday!!)

Peter Smith is a certified financial planner and is the principal of Peter Smith Financial Services Limited, Dunedin. email: finance@petersmith.co.nz