Inflation is a given in all walks of life. No matter who you are, what your financial standing, things get more expensive every day. It’s a fact of life. Unfortunately, while it does hit everybody, many of us get it worse than others.
Most recently, the middle class has been hit pretty hard by inflation, seeing seven point four percent increase. The middle class already spends about fifty percent more, on average, on schooling, gas, fresh food, and so on, and as such, even20a minor inflation boost can hit that much harder on each dollar spent.
Bear in mind that this seven point four percent inflation rate for the middle class is a stark contrast to the three point eight percent national average for inflation. This seven point four percent rise is also the highest the UK has seen in about a decade, according to the research which was by Capital Economics.
It’s been said that pensioners and middle class families are being hit hardest as they are the groups most directly affected by higher food, gas, and energy prices. For example, even school lunches are skyrocketing in price, going up to nine pounds a meal when students returned to school at the end of summer 2008. Not to mention that private school fees are steadily rising, and faster than the normal rate of inflation, to boot. Plus, just last week, Centrica, the British Gas parent company, put out an independent report revealing that gas bills may increase by as much as seventy percent, going from the already-high six hundred fifty pounds a month to an absurd eleven hundred.
In light of all of this, middle class families are being forced to get creative when it comes to solving financial woes and maintaining quality of life. For others, we need to get creative just to make ends meet. Encouraging alternative investments, the UK government has actually gone so far as to legislate no taxation on any income made through arbitrage gaming.
Don’t get the wrong idea, by the way, arbitrage gaming is betting, but it is not gambling. Gambling is high-risk, arbitrage gaming is completely risk-free. Arbitrage gaming works by allowing an investor to place a bet on every possible outcome for a given sporting event by going through multiple bookmakers and playing the odds against each other. For example, say you flip a coin and you bet one friend two to one that it lands on heads, and you bet another friend two to one that it lands on tails. If it’s heads, you lose one pound and gain two, if it’s tails, you also lose one pound and gain two (which is why this method requires two or more bookmakers, as no bookmaker is going to offer two to one on every bet).
If you’d like to give it a try, you may want to look into arbitrage software like ArbAlarm, which can help you to find and place safe bets. If you’re still not one hundred percent sold on the idea, you should read into it a bit more. Rajeev Shah’s “Sports-Arbitrage, How to Place Riskless Bets and Create Tax-Free Investments” should be able to provide you with all the information you’d want, and then some, to see if arbitrage gaming is right before putting any money into it.
Tags: UK News