THE EURO

i have just returned from TENERIFE and with the exchange rate we got, 1.11 euro to the pound, we found it VERY EXPENSIVE on holiday. in the hotel we stayed at, a brandy and lemonade cost average 9 euros,over £8!!!!.eating out at lunch time it would cost an average 35-40 euros for burgers and chips!!! for 2 adults and 2 children. so beware take plenty of cash with you, (as for me i am broke .) a little add on. the holiday bookings in TENERIFE this year are down 50%!!. SHOULD WE HAVE WENT EURO WHEN WE WENT INTO EUROPE OR STAYED WITH THE POUND.?????. music:cnfs::flag:

 

We should keep the pound. Europe has enough control over us as it is. In practical terms it would cost ordinary folks dearly if we switched currency. There is the often overlooked expense that businesses would incur when changing all their accounting and pricing structures to a different currency. All those computer systems to change. Newer ones would take it quite well, but believe me there are a lot of older ones out there that would need lots of modification, and programmers would want paying for making those changes, and guess who'd end up footing the bill.

Also, imagine if something in the UK currently costs 99p, and we switch to the Euro now. 1.11eros isn't a nice round number, so the new price might be 1.19 in keeping with our strange tradition of always being 1p short of the next 10p up. So that's instant markup on everything. I believe a similar thing happened when we went decimal and there was a bit of a public outcry, but that was before my time.

 

Don't have that problem here, music.

We have two lots of friends visiting at the moment and we are eating out every other day AT LEAST. We were six, four adults two young teens, on Monday ... two beers for the guys to begin with then two bottles of wine, four soft drinks, two litre bottles of water, one prime steak, five 'lesser' meals and with tip it came to 68 Euros ... and this was at a beautiful hotel in the hills with views to die for looking at the coast .... my house is between the hotel and the coast ... 20 minutes either way ...



Not saying Portugal is cheap ... but if you have to eat in a tourist area, sadly you pay tourist prices. Our above friends said they pay more than that for a simple meal on the coast for the four of them ... as you did. Twenty minutes inland and ....

They still come back every year as most of our friends do.

 

Keep to Sterling. Germany had one of the strongest monetary units, the Deutschmark and with it the economy before joining the Euro...and have suffered for it ever since. Like Clueless says, they suffered from the round up as well.

On a personal level, I find the Euro coins rather confusing and cheap looking - monopoly money I call it!

 

Also meant to say, OH and I went over to Ireland early this year for a wedding and the first night, we paid 12 Euros for 2 pints of beer in one pub...and it wasn't even in central Dublin!! That's more than we paid for the same in Norway (traditionally, viewed as a very expensive country!!).

 

clueless1 ... at least my £250 fuel allowance for the winter paid for my fuel, solid cork oak firewood, which cost me �280 for 3 tonnes and I have 1/4 left at least and that heated my house for 3-4 months. What would it have paid for in the UK ... s*d all.

Aaron, you know where I'm coming from and perhaps I'll convince you to move here someday ....

 

I do indeed:thumb: And you might well (wouldn't take much convincing, even with my dislike of the Euro!).

 

You're right in that £250 won't pay for much in the UK these days, but switching the Euro wouldn't make it any cheaper. Maybe in Portugal it would still cost 280 euros for 3 tonnes of fuel, but in the UK that same fuel, even if priced in euros, would be more like 800 euros. I suppose if Brussels were to impose a standard pricing structure throughout the EU then such price irregularities might go away, but it wouldn't go favourably. If we all payed the same price, you can bet it would be the higher price rather than the lower one.

 

You're right clueless ... it would probably cost you â?¬800 ... but Brussels can't control that . I buy my wood from a friend of a neighbour who lives in the Alentejo region (I am in Algarve, the region south) and I pay far less. I pay CASH for what I get. This would NEVER happen in the UK. Brussels could never change this in our countries.

You are f*cked in the UK but not here ... yet ... sorry to be so rude but that's what I live here and not there as I paid so many taxes there and got NADA for it because I chose not to have children and workd my **** off and I gained nothing, absolutely nothing except what I personally put into it .. ie, buy properties and sell them.

The Government has given me nothing since retirement except what I paid into it which was a lot of money, stupid me! And you may well say, well done ... yes, but I couldn't get good health care (I was diagnosed with cancer all too late on the health service and had to go private suddenly) or dental care ... not that I myself needed it but MIGHT HAVE. It's still a cr*p system there as far as I'm concerned and I'm pleased I'm well away from it. My coussin has just has two hips replaced and can't walk ... hello ... bells rings here ....

Shoudl I ever have to go to hospital I don't want MRSI ... and I DON'T wan't to be in the UK, thank you.

I'll take my chances in a foreign country.

 

Put like that Victoria, I might prefer to take my chances with the Euro...in another country. But that's down to the country, as you say, rather than the Euro. If that makes sense?

The cost of living in the UK is obscene now. Yes, it's expensive in Germany, Scandanavia as well, with high taxes etc, but the standards of living, service, pensions, health service, public transport is correspondingly also high. Germans pay up to 60% of their income in tax, but they get a brilliant service and standard of living in return and basic living costs are actually less than in the UK. Here we pay through the nose and get very little back in return.

Hmmm. Maybe now might be a good time for OH and I to start packing? You got room for us Victoria (and the chickens?)

 

I agree Britain is a rip off, especially compared to other EU countries. I'd love to leave this god forsaken place but have too many ties here.

I think of the euro purely in the sense of currency, rather than politics or anything else, and while I totally agree that other countries have a fairer deal than Britain (due to horrendously incompetent and spineless British politicians more than anything else), I also think that for Britain to switch to the Euro would make matters worse for us in Britain, and possibly for others within the EU.

Consider this. In an earlier post I gave an example of how retail prices might be rounded up if we switched to the euro, thus making stuff more expensive. But what about salaries? In the north a decent salary might be £25k. A nice round number. To transfer that to euros at an exchange rate of 1.11 euros to the pound, it would work out at £27750. Not such a round number, so firms offer their new recruits a nice round £27000. So we see effective pay cuts at the same time as price rises. Of course those already in a particular role when the switch happens will be protected initially by law, in that you can't reduce a salary without the employee's consent, but companies get round that with pay review freezes.

Currently, the news tells us, we are getting a lot of foreign tourists coming here to spend their money due to the favourable exchange rate for them. That would all stop because Britain would become even more expensive than it currently is, and there's be no exchange rate to offset that. Brits would be off to europe on mass for the cheaper prices (as has always been the case but possibly moreso) until the holiday companies catch on and raise prices to meet demand. By then of course european holiday destinations would have become even more pricey to cash in on the increased demand. More people might look at binning blighty and moving abroad. We've already seen Spain, France and Portugal (among others) see significant property price rises in recent years due to the increased demand, and locals, who may have got used to being on a lower salary (due to the traditionally lower cost of living) suddenly find they can't afford to live in their own country anymore (I believe this has already happened in parts of France and Spain).

I'm not going to pretend to understand all the ins and outs of economics, if I did I'd probably not be living in a rented hole in the grottier part of Sheffield, but it seems likely to me that Britain switching to the euro would be a bad thing for a lot of people.