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It is no secret to anyone who knows me at all that money torques me off. Not individual dollar bills, perhaps -- though the stack of twelve quid coins on my desk was annoying me while it was in my wallet; for some reason everyone wanted to give me change in coins today -- but the very concept of money. Although it is ultimately unavoidable, and I do treat my financial obligations responsibly, I try as hard as I can to avoid thinking about money.
Despite my annoyance at monetary systems, I do still remain a numbers geek. And money is quite quantifiable. When I came to the UK, I had carried $5300 in cash (from the sale of Pazu) with me as my start-up funds, since it would be one month before I received my first paycheck in pounds. For practical purposes, I quickly located the best place in Oxford to change cash and I monitored the daily fluctuations in the dollar-to-pound exchange rate, as even a slight difference in rate could add up to a considerable sum. In the end, I changed $3150 into pounds sterling before I started drawing my salary. So even a 1% difference in the exchange rate translates into a savings (or loss) of over thirty bucks!
At this point, I am spending the pounds that I have earned, rather than dollars. So, for now, the exchange rate no longer has a practical meaning to me. However, I am still monitoring it on a daily basis, because I am indeed a numbers geek. The last time I changed dollars to pounds was about half a month ago. At that time, the rate had been more or less stable since I had first arrived in the UK, three weeks earlier. Since then, though, the dollar has been losing value like it was going out of style. Maybe it is. This site monitors exchange rates and, over the past two weeks, the dollar has gone from an exchange of about $1.745/pound to, at today's update, $1.845/pound. That's a decrease of about 5.75% in the value of the dollar. This plot, from the same website, shows the number of pounds that one dollar buys, and may help to illustrate my point (note the supressed zero):
Thankfully, I have not had to change any money at the current rates. 5.75% may not sound like a lot, but if I had arrived in the UK one month later, I would have lost about $180 (out of the $3150 I exchanged) due to the rate difference!
Despite my annoyance at monetary systems, I do still remain a numbers geek. And money is quite quantifiable. When I came to the UK, I had carried $5300 in cash (from the sale of Pazu) with me as my start-up funds, since it would be one month before I received my first paycheck in pounds. For practical purposes, I quickly located the best place in Oxford to change cash and I monitored the daily fluctuations in the dollar-to-pound exchange rate, as even a slight difference in rate could add up to a considerable sum. In the end, I changed $3150 into pounds sterling before I started drawing my salary. So even a 1% difference in the exchange rate translates into a savings (or loss) of over thirty bucks!
At this point, I am spending the pounds that I have earned, rather than dollars. So, for now, the exchange rate no longer has a practical meaning to me. However, I am still monitoring it on a daily basis, because I am indeed a numbers geek. The last time I changed dollars to pounds was about half a month ago. At that time, the rate had been more or less stable since I had first arrived in the UK, three weeks earlier. Since then, though, the dollar has been losing value like it was going out of style. Maybe it is. This site monitors exchange rates and, over the past two weeks, the dollar has gone from an exchange of about $1.745/pound to, at today's update, $1.845/pound. That's a decrease of about 5.75% in the value of the dollar. This plot, from the same website, shows the number of pounds that one dollar buys, and may help to illustrate my point (note the supressed zero):
Thankfully, I have not had to change any money at the current rates. 5.75% may not sound like a lot, but if I had arrived in the UK one month later, I would have lost about $180 (out of the $3150 I exchanged) due to the rate difference!
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Heh... Not quite yet... though I believe that the penny is getting close to that point. I was reading that the metals in a penny (mostly zinc, as copper became to expensive some time ago) are worth about 0.8 cents. Once the metals are worth more than a cent, it's time to melt down all the pennies in that jar!
For the record, it costs an additional 0.6 cents over the metal price to mint a penny, so the cost of making one cent is 1.4 cents.
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That's pretty sad. ):