Dollar Rate

The wretched Mervyn King and his beastly quantitative easing – a system that didn't work for Japan – has badly messed up the exchange rate for lots of currencies. You are fortunate Nonu. Those of us with New Zealand family connections are seeing the pound plummet against their dollar.

Exchange rates can definitely upset many apple carts (: When we decided to come back to my native Switzerland, the £ was 2.50 Swiss Francs. In November my OH's pension was paid at 1.18 ! and we began to panic. Now back to about 1.45. Losing half of ones income is NOT funny - but ... we will just have to cut our cloth to fit. Thank goodness we live very close to France for shopping.

Know what you mean Absentgrna , I know my situation is not quite the same but I can honestly say we at one time were getting 1.90 which seems amazing now . boo hoo, but hey ho

I am so old that when I started work we used 2.80 as the exchange rate for the dollar!

grandura that works 2 ways, it was 2.4 when I was keeping my son at school in Lausanne and it cost us a fortune even though the school was free! Accommodation and food were very expensive for us but I don't grudge it now as he has done so well and is happy.

Yep - swings both ways- but having made the decision to come and live here, having done the sums very carefully, a bit of a shock. When I first went to London to work, it was so easy to work out sums- as £1 = CHF10 (now about 1.40).

Would be interested, by pm, if you prefer, how you decided on Lausanne for his education. I studied in Neuchatel myself.