Three Random Things - 22 October

Fall is here in the UK - the leaves are changing and the nights have gotten cold, so we've lit the fireplace and are settling in for our first winter. Enough about the weather, you don't care....

1. Taxes

Brits like their taxes as much as Americans. Well, they may not like them, but they sure have a lot of them! Everything is taxed differently from the states, with the most notable differences being the high sales tax, TV tax, and council tax. The value added tax (aka sales tax) is a whopping 20% on everything, which is best not to think about when shopping on the local economy. After that we have the TV tax, which is an annual fee assessed on each household to cover the cost of the BBC. Although they don't call it a tax (it's the "TV License"), I consider a mandatory payment of several hundred dollars a "tax." The final different tax is the council tax, which is assessed annually and covers the taxes for the town, district, and city you reside within. We recently received our 2014 bill, which, when converted into dollars, is about $5,000 a year! This is all without mention of normal income taxes... I haven't done the math, but I am fairly certain our British friends pay significantly more in taxes than their American friends. They should have a tea party and complain........ (history joke)

2. If the Queen dies....

I made a terrible etiquette faux pax when we moved here by asking what happens when the Queen dies. Okay, that wasn't really the question.... We were studying British currency and I noticed that Her Majesty is on all of the money in the UK. This led me to the natural question - when the Queen dies do they re-print all of the currency? The answer, apparently, is yes. The British person that was kind enough to answer this inquisition seemed to understand the question a little better when I pointed out that all of the US currency features old dead guys on it - we're not changing often!

3. Chip and Do What?

Since we're on the topic of money! Brits don't normally use the swipe credit cards that we're accustomed to using in the States. Their credit cards contain a small chip, which is inserted into the credit card machine. To authenticate the purchase, you then use a PIN number on the credit card machine. They call these "Chip and Pin" credit cards. Unfortunately, it's basically impossible to get a chip and pin card from a US bank. The closest we could get is chip and sign, meaning we insert our credit cards into the machine, but rather than using a PIN, we sign the card slip like you'd do with a swiped card. Unfortunately, because the merchants here don't recognize the system, they always give us funny looks. More than a few merchants have tried to hand us the wrong slip of paper to keep....