Randomness

DNA – Data Not Amendable

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I’ve always been intrigued by sites like 23andMe and AncestryDNA which give you insights based on a DNA sample. They claim to be able to tell you about your family heritage, identify other users with a close DNA match, and potentially indicate whether you’re susceptible to certain inherited diseases.

But I’d never got around to signing up for one. They’re not free; usually you have to pay for a kit. Also, I can’t imagine that I would get much useful data from them either. Ethnically, I’m White English, and as far as I know, so are most of my family tree going back several generations. Indeed, we haven’t really moved much out of the north of England. So such sites would be unlikely to tell me anything that I didn’t already know.

As it happens, recent events have made me even less inclined to sign up. A smaller UK firm, Atlas Biomed, seems to have gone bust, with no indication of what will happen to the data that users have provided. And the aforementioned 23andMe is in trouble; it’s cutting 200 jobs, representing 40% of its workforce, and seems to be losing multiple millions of dollars. Oh, and it got hacked last year.

Your DNA is not something you can change. It’s not like a bank account; should someone gain unauthorised access, then it’s possible for your bank to give you a new account number and cards. You can change email addresses, and, under witness protection schemes, even gain a whole new identity if needed. But you can’t make wholesale changes to your DNA (gene therapy notwithstanding). And so if your DNA leaks out, or is sold on, there’s not much you can do about it.

If you’re reading this and are thinking about using a DNA testing service, maybe undertake some due diligence first. Ask questions like: where is the company based, and where is it storing your data? How will they keep it secure? Will they securely delete all your data if you withdraw consent?

Fully-vaccinated and ready for winter

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A screenshot of the NHS winter vaccinations page

We’re halfway through October, the weather is getting colder and the nights are getting longer. So, it’s also time to get your winter vaccinations.

I’m asthmatic, and so I qualify for a free flu vaccine each year. I’m also eligible for a free Covid-19 booster; my last one was two years ago, but it looks like the eligibility rules have changed in my favour.

I had both vaccines last week. Apart from some tenderness in my arms where I had the vaccines injected, no side effects for me thankfully. Back in 2021, my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine (AstraZeneca) gave me a fever for a few days, but subsequent vaccinations (Pfizer and Moderna) have been much milder.

You’ll probably find that, if you’re eligible for a free flu vaccine on the NHS, your GP surgery will contact you to ask you to make an appointment. For the Covid-19 vaccine, I was able to book this myself on the NHS app.

Getting vaccinated privately

If you don’t qualify for a free vaccine, but still want to get protected, you can pay for one privately. Boots will charge you £22, and Superdrug £20 (or £10 if you have their loyalty card). Alternatively, check with your workplace; my employer offers vouchers for a free flu vaccination with Boots to all employees who aren’t otherwise eligible for one on the NHS.

The Covid-19 vaccines are rather more expensive – about £100 at Boots, although some may sell them for less, with the cheapest Novavax vaccine costing £45.

If I didn’t get them for free on the NHS then I would probably pay for the flu vaccine. The last time I had flu was in October 2003. The fact that I can remember the rough date 21 years later shows how much I’m happy to have the vaccine to avoid going that again. I was eligible for a flu vaccine back then too, but managed to get flu before I could get vaccinated.

As for Covid-19 – I’ve definitely had it at least once since March 2020, an almost certainly twice. In both cases, it was just like a bad cold (but over more quickly). But I also lost two friends to that virus in 2020, and so I know how serious it could be.

RSV and pneumococcal vaccines

If you’re 65+ or pregnant, then you may also be eligible for one or two other winter vaccines: RSV, against the respiratory syncytial virus, and pneumococcal, against some forms of pneumonia and meningitis. If your GP surgery hasn’t already been in touch, have a chat with them if you meet the eligible criteria.

And remember, vaccination isn’t just about protecting yourself. Not everyone can have vaccines, but if you’re vaccinated, you’ll help to prevent the spread of diseases which continue to kill thousands of people in the UK each year.

Sometimes it’s good just to write utter rubbish

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On the one hand, this blog post is just some filler content. I’m trying to keep up with my schedule of a new blog post every other day and needed to write something, and so this will have to do. I’m writing this on a dull, wet Saturday afternoon and have next to no inspiration to write anything useful. What I write won’t rank highly on search engines, or get reposted lots of time on social media. In fact, you’re probably wasting your time reading this because I’m only writing it because I feel I have to, and not because I necessarily want to. After all, Google and other search engines like web sites that are updated frequently, and if I take another long break from blogging then my posts will drop down the rankings and no-one will ever visit.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s good just to write utter rubbish. It gets your brain going, and once you’ve written some utter rubbish and cleared your head, you’ll be warmed up to write something more useful. At least, that’s the theory, according to this book by Gillie Bolton and Russell Delderfield (sponsored link) that I read back in 2021.

I read the book as part of a postgraduate university course that I did, mostly during lockdown, which included teaching on reflective practice. This wasn’t one of the core books on the reading list, but it was recommended to me by, err, well, Russell Delderfield himself. He’s a former colleague of mine. Gillie Bolton, the principal author, is a big fan of writing anything for a few minutes, and recommends it at the start of each exercise in the book.

Does it work? Well, it’s not a method that I use much – most blog posts that I write have spent at least a few days in my head before I write them down. But when faced with the need to write something, I suppose it’s helped here. I’ve left the first paragraph in; if I was writing professionally, I’m sure that an editor would probably remove it and want me to SEO optimise the remaining text. That’s not going to happen here. This is going to be a completely un-optimised, un-edited stream of consciousness blog post that might be useful for some people. And sometimes that’s okay. I mean, it’s my blog after all.

Welcome to August

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It’s the 1st August today. That means that it’s Yorkshire Day, and for once, I’m actually in Yorkshire as normal on Yorkshire Day for the first time since 2020.

But August is also my busiest month of the year at work. I work in university admissions, and the 15th August is the date when most 18-year-olds get their exam results, so there’s a lot of work to be done either side of this date. I’ll be working longer hours that day, as well as a couple of weekend days.

What this means is that most blog posts this month will have been written in advance. I still have the rest of our holiday to write up, which you’ll hopefully see over the next couple of weeks. And I’ll try to intersperse these posts with other topics. But there’s also a good chance that I may fall behind on my aim to publish a new blog post every other day, if I don’t manage to get enough posts written ahead of time.

Cheap international roaming – Airalo eSIM

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A screenshot of an iPhone 13 Mini running iOS 16 which has both a regular SIM and an eSIM installed

It used to be that, before Brexit, all of us Brits had free roaming on our mobile phones across other EU member states. Now, O2 is the only Big 4 mobile provider not to charge for roaming in the EU. I’m with Three, who re-introduced roaming charges despite being one of the first to scrap them even before they were required to.

So, in the second of my two blog posts about things we’ve done to make our holidays a little easier, I’m going to talk about eSIMs, and how you can use them to get cheaper data when travelling. The first post was on using a tag to pay for motorway tolls in Europe from Monday.

An eSIM is an ’embedded SIM’. So, unlike a SIM card that you put into your phone, an eSIM is built in. However, newer phones make this eSIM re-programmable, and so you can download a profile to change your eSIM to a different network. Normally, this is in addition to whichever physical SIM card is in your phone.

What this means is that you can have your regular SIM for making calls and sending/receiving SMS messages, and then a different eSIM for data. This can be a local eSIM, so you don’t have to pay roaming charges. And, because your regular SIM is still there, you’re still reachable on your regular phone number.

A screenshot of the Airalo web site which lets you buy an eSIM

Buying an eSIM from Airalo

Whilst in France, I bought my eSIM from Airalo. You install their app, purchase your eSIM, and then install it so that your phone can use it. It’s straightforward, and the eSIMs are not expensive. I paid $10 for a 3 GB eSIM that was valid for 30 days, which was sufficient. By contrast, I would have spent £2 per day to roam with Three, which would have added up to £20. $10 is roughly £8, so it saved a little money. Airalo also offers ‘Airmoney’ which is essentially cashback on each purchase, that can be accumulated towards buying more credit.

When you have both a regular SIM and an eSIM active, your phone should show the signal for both. In my case, I was connected to Bouygues for voice and SMS, and Orange for data.

If you use an iPhone, then you’ll need an iPhone XR, XS or XS Max or later. These were the models announced in September 2018, so unless you have a very old iPhone, you should be able to use an eSIM. Obviously support for Android phones will vary by manufacturer; my wife has a Samsung Galaxy phone of a similar age and this didn’t support an eSIM.

Whilst there are other eSIM retailers besides Airalo, this is the one I have experience with. If you want to try them yourself, then if you use the code ‘NEIL6715’ when signing up, you’ll get $3 credit.

AboutMy.email

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Screenshot of the aboutmy.email screen

So, now that I’m sending out email newsletters, I need to be sure that people will actually receive the emails. Because email spam is still a problem after all these years, the big webmail providers have strict requirements to ensure that email reaches their user inboxes, and AboutMy.email is a really simple testing tool.

When you open the web page, you’ll be given an automatically generated unique email address. All you need to do is send an email to this address, preferably by adding it to your email list. Once the email comes through, AboutMy.email will analyse it, and let you know what you need to improve.

I had already set up DMARC, DKIM and SPF on my domain, and so, as you can see from the screenshot, it scored quite well. Other things that I’ve gained points for are my site having an IPv6 address, and using TLS for email connections.

To improve the score further, I’ve subsequently added a BIMI record, and need to look into adding unsubscribe headers from my emails. But it’s a very good start, and should reduce the chances of my emails ending up in user’s spam folders. I like how simple AboutMy.email is – you don’t need to register an account, and there’s no spam follow-ups afterwards (which would be ironic I suppose).

Sprive – a mortgage over-payment app

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A screenshot of the Sprive app on iOS

If you’re lucky enough to own your own home, and are paying off a mortgage on it, then you may want to consider signing up to Sprive.

Sprive is an app for iOS and Android, that lets you easily make over-payments on your mortgage. Once you’ve registered, it’ll ask to link to your bank account using Open Banking, and you can then set a minimum and maximum amount to over-pay each month.

The minimum payment can go out on a date that you set, and then Sprive will monitor your current account balance and suggest further payments if you have sufficient money left. Sprive normally gives you a notification a few days before it talks a payment and they’re easy to cancel.

I’m using the absolute minimum amounts – £25 per month, and a maximum of £75 per month. However, even such small additional contributions should mean that we pay off our mortgage earlier. The Sprive app visualises this, and reckons we’re on track to be mortgage-free about 18 months earlier than we would be without over-payments. That translates to around £2000 less interest that we would have to pay otherwise. It’ll also show you what loan-to-value rate you are eligible for, and how much of your house you own. Having bought our house not quite 9 years ago, we now own 55% of it, although this is more due to the house increasing in value rather than our repayments.

Sprive Rewards

As well as siphoning off money from your bank account, there’s Sprive Rewards. This allows you to buy gift cards for many retailers (including all the major supermarkets) where a percentage is then used as a mortgage over-payment. For example, you could buy a £50 Tesco gift card, and have 3% (£1.50) used as an over-payment. You can, of course, use these gift cards for your own shopping, so whilst the savings may not seem like much, they can add up. You can even save 1% with Amazon; when I spent £75 there recently, that 75p has the potential to save me as much as £16 down the line in mortgage interest. I’m not a fan of gift cards, but this is where they can be used to save money.

MoneySavingExpert has a useful mortgage overpayment guide, including what you need to bear in mind. Most mortgage providers do let you overpay up to 10% of your mortgage each year, but it’s worth checking your paperwork. If you over-pay too much, you may pay a penalty for doing so.

If you like what you’ve read, and want to sign up to Sprive, you can use my referral code which is HTWH65PM. This will give you an additional £5 head start – so it’s basically free money, albeit not much and only redeemable as an over-payment on your mortgage.

Happy Easter!

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An AI generated image of a giant chocolate easter egg surrounded by multicoloured rabbits

I hope you’re having a restful Easter break. We’re staying with my parents in York for a couple of days, as per usual (barring 2020 and 2021) and I will no doubt consist of at least 40% chocolate by the end of the day.

Easter has come comparatively early this year. Not as early as 2008 (23rd March), and the absolute earliest it can be in the Gregorian Calendar is the 22nd March. The last time it was that early was in 1818, and it won’t happen again until 2285. Still, the last time Easter Sunday fell in March was 2016, and next year it’ll be very late – the 20th April.

Despite Easter falling early, it’s still felt like a long time since the Christmas break, and I’m appreciating an extended weekend off work. As well as the Good Friday and Easter Monday bank holidays, we get Tuesday off work too, every year.

Why you shouldn’t buy gift cards as presents

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An AI generated image of a Christmas tree with lots of presents and gift cards underneath it by a window.

When you need to buy a present for someone, and aren’t sure what to get them, gift cards seem like a good idea. With Christmas coming up, I’m going to explain why they’re not always the best idea.

They’re less flexible than cash

If you spend £10 to buy a £10 gift card, all you have done is taken £10 of cash, which can be spent anywhere, and converted it into a sort of pseudo-currency that can only be used at one shop. You can’t use a gift voucher for John Lewis at M&S for example.

Whilst multi-retailer gift cards like Love2Shop and One4All exist, they still limit you to a small range of retailers. And you can usually only spend them at large chain stores, so your recipient won’t be able to spend them at a local, independent shops. Let’s face it, Amazon is likely to be around for a long time, but independent shops would probably appreciate your custom.

They can only be used to purchase things

This might seem obvious, but you can only use gift cards to buy more things. You can’t use gift cards to pay bills, or repay debt, for example. And I mean, you really can’t – if someone claims to be HM Revenue & Customs and asks you to pay your tax bill with iTunes Gift Cards, then it’s a scam.

For someone who may be drowning in credit card debt, receiving some money that they can use to pay that off may be more meaningful. At worst, you could end up spending your money on a gift card that can only be used to buy something at a shop where the cost of getting there is higher than the value of the card.

They could also be worthless. If you’re an Android phone user, then you’re not going to get much out of an iTunes gift card, for example. You could try a web site that exchanges gift cards, where you can sell an unwanted gift card for cash. However, you’ll probably get less than its value back, and obscure gift cards may not sell for much.

They expire

Most gift cards expire after 12 months. We’ve had this problem before; a relative bought our (now) seven-year-old a gift card for a well-known toy shop chain. As their birthday is close to Christmas, we saved it to buy a gift the following year, but by the time we came to use it, it had expired. Meanwhile, cash never expires.

If the retailer goes bust, they may become worthless

We’ve recently seen the demise of Wilko in the UK, and other large chain stores like Debenhams, Jessops, Comet, Woolworths, Burtons have all disappeared in recent years. Usually, when these companies go bankrupt and call in administrators, their gift cards immediately become worthless. At best, you can sign up as a creditor of the company in the hope that you may get a fraction of the value of the gift card back.

Some people have lost serious money because of this in the past. Debenhams used to offer a wedding list service, and so those that had people buy them Debenhams gift cards as wedding presents may have lost out on hundreds of pounds.

What to do instead

Buying presents can be tricky, and I don’t think anyone wants to buy something that’ll just end up listed on eBay on Boxing Day. But maybe have a conversation with the person who you are buying a gift for first. Surprises can be nice, but so can knowing that you’re getting a thing that you actually want for Christmas. Christmas lists for Santa needn’t just be for children; you could keep a list in a note-taking app, for example, so that if anyone asks you what you want, you can tell them straight-away.

Or you could just give people cash. If all you are doing is swapping the same amount of money for a card which is restricted to one retailer and expires, then you’re taking choice away from your recipient. With cash, your recipient could use that money for:

  • the weekly food shop
  • to pay off a credit card
  • buy something nice from a small independent shop.

An Amazon gift card won’t allow the recipient to do any of those things.

If you don’t want to put bank notes or coins in the post, you can send a cheque. Despite rumblings from the banking industry a few years ago, most banks will still let you send and receive cheques. Indeed, most banking apps will let you scan cheques, so you can scan them on Christmas Day without waiting for a branch to open. Alternatively, you could send an IOU in a card, and then do a BACS transfer on Christmas Day. That’s if you already know their bank details, of course.

When is it appropriate to send gift cards?

So, now that I have written this, you may be surprised to hear that I am planning to send gift cards to some relatives this Christmas. But this is only because said relatives have specifically asked for them. And that’s fine – you could ask for gift cards as a contribution to a big purchase, for example. Just be careful that you choose a retailer that isn’t at imminent risk of bankruptcy. Money Saving Expert News is usually a good place to get news about retailers that are, or are at risk of entering administration, and their policy on accepting gift cards.

You can also sometimes buy gift cards at a discount. My employer offers Pluxee as an employee benefit, which sells gift cards at a typical 4% discount – but sometimes more. M&S is 6.5%, which means that you can buy a £25 gift card for £23.38.

If your employer doesn’t offer something similar, but you have a mortgage, then Sprive is worth considering. With Sprive, the discounts are smaller (about 3%) but the money you save is taken off your mortgage. If you decide to sign up to Sprive, use my referral code ‘HTWH65PM’ to get an additional £5 off your mortgage.

If you’re buying Amazon gift cards, it’s worth checking your personalised promotions page (sponsored link). Sometimes, Amazon offers additional discounts available if you buy gift cards in bulk.

Christmas Day is three weeks today. If you haven’t already finished your Christmas shopping, maybe reach out to your gift recipients to find out what they want. Just be aware of the last posting days for gifts.

Thirty-two

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So today’s my birthday. I’m 32, which isn’t a particularly notable age, other than the realisation that my GCSE exams were half a lifetime ago. So rather than ramble on about how I’m feeling old, I thought I’d look back at what I’ve written on my birthday in previous years:

I’m actually surprised that several years went by where I didn’t think to write anything on my birthday. That may have something to do with not having the ability to schedule blog posts in advance back in ye olden days. 2005 was a particular surprise, as back then I often posted new entries multiple times a day – this was in the days before Twitter and the like.

As for 2017? Well, I have a whole year to think of something to write, I suppose.

We’re not doing much for my birthday – I’m at work as normal today (and have a two hour afternoon meeting!) but we’ll probably go out for dinner tonight.