Bankruptcy

[doodab]

Unless you are really loaded or in the category of doing 2-3 year stints in different parts of the world, I'd recommend a German state school over an international one to be honest.

Well, I think we have proven that I'm not really loaded.....

[lilelvis2000]

Any tips on persuading a woman to wake up, smell the coffee and do what is good for them & the family rather than living in cloud ******* cuckoo land will be gratefully received. Failing that, any tips on getting rid of 20k of unsecured debt would be handy.

My wife runs the household finances..all the bills etc.. I actually have to ask for my own money off of her. Now, almost immediately she realised the financial problem which we have. She then implemented a budget and tightened the strings and I even have reduced my takings from the company - all at her request! I say nothing but "okay babe".

We're doing better now. She has even realised that I will probably have to take on a part-time shelf stacking job at some point so I don't go bankrupt myself.

[doodab]

My wife runs the household finances..all the bills etc.. I actually have to ask for my own money off of her. Now, almost immediately she realised the financial problem which we have. She then implemented a budget and tightened the strings and I even have reduced my takings from the company - all at her request! I say nothing but "okay babe".

We're doing better now. She has even realised that I will probably have to take on a part-time shelf stacking job at some point so I don't go bankrupt myself.

If I let mine do that I will end up with a house full of cheap tulip that either isn't fit for purpose or breaks when you look at it, 600 pairs of cheap faux leather shoes and a lot of completely random tulip so bizarre that I can't even work out what it is well enough to describe it on here.

[TheFaQQer]

How long is the contract in Germany? Maybe she is just thinking that she doesn't want to up sticks completely and then find out in 2 months that you've all got to move back to the UK.

Dare I suggest permiedom to get more of your generic skills away from the niche? A regular salary might also help to focus her mind on how much money is available to spend. Then when you have more generic skills, you can get different roles, which would help longer-term.

[Churchill]

If I let mine do that I will end up with a house full of cheap tulip that either isn't fit for purpose or breaks when you look at it, 600 pairs of cheap faux leather shoes and a lot of completely random tulip so bizarre that I can't even work out what it is well enough to describe it on here.

Sounds like she's shopping because she's terminally bored. You need to sort it or things will take their course and you'll get a "Dear John".

[doodab]

How long is the contract in Germany? Maybe she is just thinking that she doesn't want to up sticks completely and then find out in 2 months that you've all got to move back to the UK.

I've been here just over 2 1/2 years. They have offered me a permanent job, salary currently TBD but probably not enough, or I can carry on with my current contract terms which due to exchange rates is currently about the best rate I've ever had. They have offered to let me work 50% of my time at home. So I don't think job security is the issue.

Dare I suggest permiedom to get more of your generic skills away from the niche? A regular salary might also help to focus her mind on how much money is available to spend. Then when you have more generic skills, you can get different roles, which would help longer-term.

TBH I don't think a lack of generic skills is the problem. I've got them. In London at least it's getting past the agents when I have zero experience of financial services on my CV and a lot of "integrating niche project X with X, Y Z" even though the truth of it is java with web services, spring, hibernate, JMS and so on has been my day job since 2005, before that I was a PL/SQL programmer and before that a combo of PL/SQL & C made up 80% of my work for about 6 years.

I've been contracting for just over 13 years and up until 2008 I had never been on the bench and aside from the first gig I ever got and two others I've never even had an interview, I didn't even have to think about looking for work because people who knew me would phone me up and offer me jobs. 99% of that was because of the generic skills I have in addition to niche product X, and of course I had little cause to chase non-niche jobs with people phoning me up and offering me work. Great as that was, I think it might turn out to be a bit of a curse, because those jobs have just dried up now.

The main avenues I'm thinking of pursuing are are sitting the Sun Java Programmer / Web Component / Business Component etc cert exams and perhaps getting back up to speed on Oracle and doing the OCP cert, but I don't know if it would help. The other thing I might try is one of those CV writing services. Has anyone tried those?

I was thinking of going with a format that had name & address then itemised list of skills & experience at the top followed by recent experience i.e. the last 4-5 gigs and leaving the education stuff and older gigs anyway off.

I need to do something anyway. I can't be doing with being poor.

[doodab]

Sounds like she's shopping because she's terminally bored. You need to sort it or things will take their course and you'll get a "Dear John".

She isn't shopping very much at all. It's just that when she does, she does tend to come back with the cheapest crappiest thing in the shop and then act all surprised when it doesn't live up to her expectations.

[Spacecadet]

At the moment for my little niche the going rate seems to be £300-350, and the only stuff I have seen advertised is in out of the way locations i.e. a job came up in Yorkshire. A lot of stuff never ends up advertised though, and the company I am working through at the moment probably handle 40-50% of the work in that niche in the UK, so getting specifics of what might be out there is next to impossible.

When we moved in to our little flat I had had steady work for at least £450 for years, and after taking a few months off when my son was born I was back on the gravy train, but the arse really dropped out of the market in 2008 and I had six months on the bench before coming over here, not because the rate was good but because it was the only thing that came up in that 6 months.

That is the downside of niche skills compared to common or garden ones I suppose. The annoying thing is I *have* good common or garden skills lie Java, Oracle C on Unix and so on but agents often won't touch me because it's mostly been in conjunction with a niche product.

so in the past 2-3 years what have you done to make you're not stuck in a little niche?
That's more than enough time to get trained in something else and cross sell your skills into other areas which have more demand

[MarillionFan]

If I let mine do that I will end up with a house full of cheap tulip that either isn't fit for purpose or breaks when you look at it, 600 pairs of cheap faux leather shoes and a lot of completely random tulip so bizarre that I can't even work out what it is well enough to describe it on here.

Send me her email address. I'm having a closing down sale she might like.

[Clippy]

She does shop at Asda. It's me that goes to Waitrose. The savings aren't as clear cut as you think, it's largely marketing that leads people to believe that. Quite a few things are actually cheaper or the same price, not to mention that their bog standard own brand stuff (e.g. bacon, meat, bread etc) is of a better quality and it's viable to buy that where you might have to buy "premium" stuff in another supermarket to get the same quality.

Edit: actually this isn't true, I used to shop at Waitrose but I now live in Germany and we don't actually have Waitrose here. If anything I would say it's slightly cheaper than the UK.

Tis true.