Waffle

Just weeks ago, I was contemplating opening a savings account at IceSave - for people outside the Netherlands who haven't been following along, IceSave is an online savings bank owned by the Icelandic bank Landsbanki, which offered over 5 1/2% interest rate on its mainstream savings account product. Ironically, this was prompted by a mailing from my regular bank, the Postbank, which suggested I upgrade to a different savings account from the low-yield one I was using.

Why didn't I do it? I read up. I read up about how the banking guarantee system worked, and found that while the savings account would be covered by the same guarantees that banks in the Netherlands offered, i.e. the first €20,000 would be fully guaranteed by them and then the second would be 90% covered by the Dutch Central bank, actually getting to that first 20K in case of a bank collapse would be cumbersome. I also learned that the bank didn't have its act together, service-wise. Also that there were problems with the capitalisation and leverage of Icelandic banks - though I didn't pay much attention to the details there. So I went with ASN instead. Slightly less interest, but still more than competitive and safer - and also a bank that focuses on sustainable investments.

Readers in the Netherlands will already know that I really dodged a bullet there. This week, Iceland nationalised all its banks, IceSave suffered a bank run, shut its website down, and now there's even doubt whether the Icelandic central bank is even able to meet its obligation to guarantee the account holders' savings. Iceland, a tiny country with fewer inhabitants than the US state of Wyoming, is in a deep financial crisis and its government is now borrowing from Russia - which many speculate will want favours in return. Savers have organized to seize IceSave's assets but whether they'll be succesful is anyone's guess. The UK central bank has decided to step in and guarantee British account holders' funds for them. The Dutch government has decided to pass on that one, for now; it's already bought out a large bank and doesn't particularly want to hold the bag for another.

I'm sure that IceSave savers will get their money back... eventually. But it just goes to show that a little homework can save you a lot of trouble. And it doesn't have to be a lot - the above is pretty much all I know about the IceSave situation, and some of it may be misremembered from the many blogs I read. Just spending an hour or two asking around will be enough.

And listen to people who know these things already. My friend Kim, who knows a lot about Icelandic society, has been warning her friends off IceSave, and she reports that among the people now scrambling for their savings are some friends of hers who didn't listen.

A lot of my friends suffer from moderate to severe depression. Myself, I tend towards depressiveness and have a personality evaluation to prove it - I'm pretty normal except for tendencies towards anxiety and depression. The avalanche of bad economic news has been triggering both tendencies hard. So here, as a mental note to myself and hopefully a useful hint to people who have the same problem, here's what I do to keep depression and the need for Prozac at bay:

Exercise. Specifically, I run, do circuit training at the gym and occasionally swim. This goes to the top of my list because I do it a lot and it has immediate effect. Stress-relief and a general sense of well-being lasts for several hours after exercise, until I get sore. This is a small price to pay. It also gives me a feeling of control over my body - I can measure the performance improvements, and see and feel that it's "improving" by the measures I've chosen. When I get sore, I may be bad-tempered the next day, but that's better than feeling depressed.

St. John's Wort. A friend who works as a therapist recommended it to me. It's not all it's cracked up to be - one problem with natural medicines that work is that they do have side-effects, just like regular meds produced in a chemist's lab. In my case, my headaches have increased in frequency since I started taking it, though the extra headaches are mild. But it's available without a prescription, and doesn't overregulate your emotional life like prescription antidepressants. It appears to be more potent when drunk as a tea than when taken in pill form, but the downside to that is that you don't necessarily know how much of the active ingredients are in the tea.

Vitamin D. I live in a northern climate and am pretty dark-skinned for a white man. When I spend all daylight hours in the office or at home, I get a nasty case of Seasonal Affective Disorder which peaks in February/March, because that's when the stores of vitamin D in the body run out. So I take a supplement (and if I can find one that doesn't come with calcium, I'll switch to that), occasionally use a tanning bed starting October, and try to get out of the house on sunny weekend days.

Avoid busywork and overcommitment and strive to do work that actually delivers the goods. This is difficult at work, but doable in my spare time. Avoiding overcommitment is the main reason why I am making so little progress on the comic - but I do try to make time to work on it. When this doesn't work, I try to draw things I can finish in a shorter time, or write blog posts.

Declutter, organize, economize. I've been talking a lot about these things. Aside from being directly beneficial to my life, they also give me a feeling of control and accomplishment. Progress is slow, but it does work.

Generally, try to accomplish something every day. Even if it's just a drawing or a blog post. Or a good meal. Create something that wasn't there before.

Get informed. Facing the things that worry me is a double-edged sword. Until now, though, being able to talk meaningfully about the financial crisis and other things that worry me, and figuring out what I can and cannot do about them, still helps me more than it hurts me. I can imagine taking a news and media fast in the very near future, though.

Things I'm not doing so well at: Getting out of the house. I need to remind myself to leave the house outside work hours/errands and see my friends. Part of this is of course due to being in a very-long-distance relationship where we only get to have any kind of contact at all during those hours that most people go out for drinks.

Getting enough sleep. This is something I've always been bad at. I'm an evening person, but I have to get up early in the morning to work. So I get about six hours during the working week.

Those two things are still good depression management tips if you can actually do them, though. What do you do to shake off the blues?

... that the part of webcartooning where I spend hours prepping files for publication and then uploading them through a database has lost all its appeal.

There was one page missing from the Courtly Manners serial currently running on rocr.net. This has now been restored. Thanks to Geir for pointing it out.

Interesting. I should pick this release up when I've got some time. I haven't used the GIMP much at all since it became practical to use Photoshop on linux, but it always pays to stay ahead of new developments, and if they're finally making some progress in dealing with what people hate the most about the GIMP—its window management and menu interface—then that'll give the program a huge boost.

The drawing above is now for sale through my Comicspace galleries. You will need to sign up with Comicspace to be able to see it (to certify that you are old enough to look at nipples) but the process is easy and does not result in you getting spammed. If you don't want to buy it that way, though, you can also e-mail me and buy from me directly. Price is set at $100 - not exactly a bucketload of money.

I have also made it available as a Print via DeviantArt, in a range of formats and at the default prices. There, too, you'll have to sign up to view and order.

It's actually been 2 and a half years since I wrote this post in which I griped about my bank, the Postbank, offering a silly rewards program to get deals on consumer goods with its basic savings account instead of an interest rate above inflation. 2 and a half years, and I've only now gotten off my ass and opened a savings account at ASN Bank (the product I use is ASN Ideaalsparen, which at the time of writing offers 4.75% interest and requires automatic saving so I'll be following the Pay Yourself First principle of personal finance). I'm still finalizing the paperwork and will be using their one-time offer to move my savings over before Jan. 2009.

I don't think there's any excuse for anyone even using a savings product that doesn't offer a rate above inflation (outside of situations where hyperinflation takes place, but in a financial collapse at that level, you're probably better off spending your money on canned food and firearms), but if I were to try, I'd argue that back in 2006, I really wasn't able to save much money anyway. I am now, though, and I'll be using that opportunity for as long as I manage to remain employed. Even in a recession (and even in one where trust in the banking system is suffering), I'm still better off earning real interest on my money than in letting it rot away slowly.