Reclaiming My Icesave Savings – Day 1

This blog is normally focused on Internet Marketing, eBay and technology based posts, but I happened to have a savings account with the Icelandic bank – Icesave. Yesterday, Tuesday 7th October it was announced that their parent bank, Landsbanki had gone into receivership and had been nationalized. All Icesave customers were unable to deposit, or withdraw money….But on the brightside, I guess we are now all proud owners of a glacier!

Since then it’s been very unclear as to where we stand, so I thought I’d blog about how to get back savings that were held with Icesave.

To start with, let’s take a look at the deposit insurance you SHOULD have with an Icelandic bank: (Taken from the Sky news website)

If an Icelandic bank fails UK customers are protected up to £50,000

Joint accounts will be protected up to £100,000

The first £16,170 of their money is protected by Iceland

The remaining £33,830 is protected by the UK government

If Iceland goes bankrupt, the UK will not cover the first £16,170

Since then we’ve heard that the Iceland Government has no plans to honor the insurance, which this morning caused the UK Government to personally guarantee all deposits in Icesave, and take legal action against Iceland for defaulting on the guarantee. It has also frozen all UK assests of Landsbanki until more information in available.

So where are we at know, and what should we do?

Well, there’s not really anything we can do. Nobody really knows how to go about claiming, or who to make a claim to. I’m sure things will become clearer in the coming days, but for now we have to wait for more information.

What Have I Done So Far?

I’ve logged into my Icesave account and printed off a statement of my account!

That’s all for now, I’ll post again when I have more information.

I Think I’m Under Charging You

It was my Dad’s birthday last night, so we all went out for a meal – Me, Mum, Dad, Brother and his Girlfriend. As we walked through the stiff creaky door we approached the rather intimidating manager, she towered over us like a menacing menu bearing giant, but it was raining outside so we didn’t mind, all we wanted was to sit down and eat after a hard day.

We were directed to a table, the wooden floor banged as we pulled back our sturdy wooden chairs and sat down to read the menu. Looking around we could see we were the only people sat in the eating area, nobody said anything, but I could tell we were all thinking the same thing – How is Dan going to turn this into a blog post?

Quite easily actually 🙂

Fast forward a couple of hours and we were waiting for the deserts to arrive. On the menu was a very strange “Chocolate and Rhubarb Crumble”…but that’s not important right now. We were all chatting away, well, four of us were chatting away – my brother appears to still be shaking off the shackles of puberty so he managed a grunt every now and again.

Conversation turned towards my brother’s girlfriend, who happens to work for a local IT company that provides web hosting, design, coding and other similar services to schools and businesses across the UK.

With me running a similar venture in D9 Hosting, I was curious to see how the company was run. After a bit of background information, we turned to pricing, where I was amazed to hear:

“We charge £250 to install Google Analytics”

£250 for Google Analytics! That’s almost $500 to place a few lines of JavaScript on a page!

They also charge a similar price to setup Google Docs for customers, and charge an arm and a leg for web design and hosting. Their monthly sales target is £100,000 (about $200,000) and with those sorts of prices it won’t surprise you that they meet it most months.

Now there’s no way we could charge you that sort of price for any of the services I’ve mentioned, you would all probably have a rough idea of how much to pay for that sort of work – and it would be a lot less than £250!

*FYI, there’s actually a couple of Google Analytics “How To’s” on this blog, you’ll be able to find them using the search bar on your right*

BUT, the vast majority of offline businesses are still more than happy to pay top dollar for IT services, be it web design, hosting, script installation or consultation, and what’s more. I think that 95% of you reading this are more than capable of providing these services – skills you pick up on your Internet Marketing journey are more valuable than you could ever imagine.

Just ask yourself if you can install Google Analytics?

I’m sure most of you answered “Yes” to the above question, and I’m sure you know some offline people who run websites, why not see if they’d be interested in having you install it for them?

That’s just one example of taking what you’ve learnt in the online world, into the offline sector, there are many, many more ways to do this. I am currently working on a big offline project with my D9 Hosting partner, Paula, that should be launching in the next few weeks so stay tuned for that.

Nothing much to add, just really made the post to open your eyes to the opportunities that exist away from the PC screen!

That’s all for today, I was going to hold off writing this until Thursday but thought I’d get it down on paper whilst it was all still fresh in my head.

As always comments are my friend and yours, so do leave one if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Dan

P.S. I had a Bacon & Cheese Burger and a Knickerbockerglory (sp?) for desert – 7/10