Expatriate Lifestyle News and Advice

“Hello, I’m Mrs. Mugabe and I want to offer you $1 million…”  You know what I am talking about I presume?  The “Nigerian” email scams which regularly appear in your inbox, offering you a chance to have a share in millions of dollars left by some displaced dictator, dead explorer, long lost relative or whoever.  Don’t tell me you’ve never received one?!  Well, just in case you haven’t, here’s how they work: -

Someone emails you a rather pathetic offer they presume you can’t refuse.  Often they refer to you in a most friendly manner and make some obscure reference about how they got your email address, implying that you may perhaps know them.  The offer is usually a share in money, gold, or gems, which the person asking needs you to receive and look after for a while.  In order to do this you need to give them a number of your personal details, and usually send them a small amount of cash for them to process some paperwork to get the large amount of loot released into your care.

If we haven’t received such email scams ourselves we’ve certainly heard about them – and therefore we tend to assume that everyone is immune to being taken in nowadays.  However, as I will demonstrate, there are those who have now taken this scamming model a significant step further, who are now robbing innocent people around the world of significant sums of money, and making otherwise savvy and intelligent people look like absolute idiots.  Introducing you to the innocent victims of the new breed of email scam – to highlight how anyone can potentially be taken in, and how you need to ensure your family, friends and fellow expats are forewarned and therefore forearmed against these evil cheats.

Continue reading...

How about a bit of controversy for a Monday morning?  At Shelter Offshore we’re not into controversy for controversy’s sake – however, where there is a myth being widely disseminated and accepted as fact by the world’s media, and we have evidence to support an argument against the general perception, we are not going to shy away from presenting it to you for your consideration.

Today we’re going to be looking at the perceived land grab that’s allegedly being made by large international corporations in countries in Africa, which has been the subject of much international news of late.  In the humble opinion of our Africa correspondent, it can be no coincidence that the world’s media is focusing on this story at the same time as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is in the process of developing guidelines for developing countries to help them manage their land resources. 

The development of these UN FAO guidelines has been based on very limited consultation, generally excluding the very corporations accused of greed and profiting from poor Africans, (see recent articles in the UK’s Guardian and Observer newspapers for examples of this).  So it is all too easy to portray evil, land-hungry corporations as displacing poor Africans - but do you really think this is the whole story?

Continue reading...

We’ve touched on the subject of repatriation before – because it’s important – and because we don’t all move abroad for the rest of our lives; and even those of us who perhaps do, have to accept that fate can have a hand in our future and change the direction of our lives sometimes, so that we find ourselves on the way back to Blighty having once vowed we’d never set foot in the place for love nor money for example!

For thousands of Britons currently living in the eurozone, the devaluation of the pound in terms of its strength against the euro has been so dramatic and so severe that the cost of living is impossibly high.  The ongoing recession in parts of Europe makes earning an income hard too…what’s more, the eurozone’s instability at the moment is causing even more economic uncertainty for some Brits – many of whom are now seriously revaluating their position abroad.

Whilst the UK still has a seriously high exodus rate – fuelled currently because of the impending higher rate tax hike – every year thousands of expats return.  And 2010 will be no exception to that rule: in fact, according to a new survey by Moneycorp, up to 70% of Brits in Europe are contemplating a permanent flight home.  Personally I think that figure is excessively and artificially inflated – but just in case you want or need to know how to come back to Britain, here’s Shelter Offshore’s repatriation advice in the form of 20 top tips.

Continue reading...