Ash Wednesday marks the start of Lent – the period of time leading up to Easter Sunday. It symbolises the 40 days and nights Jesus spent alone in the desert after his baptism and before his ministry. For this reason, people give up something, or change their behaviour during Lent. In order to reflect on the meaning of Easter.  Traditionally, people give up chocolate. Some more original ideas I have seen are: giving up Facebook and giving up haircuts.

The pastor at my church (crazy) Dan proposed something more radical – living on benefits for 6 weeks. In effect, giving up money. That means living on job seekers allowance, which for me is £63.40 a week. I’ll be starting on Sunday 21 February for 6 weeks, ending on Easter Sunday!

Why?

• Money for the poor in Greenwich – the money saved from living on benefits will go towards a poor council estate in Greenwich.
• Reflect on how fortunate we are – we are in the top 1% income bracket of the the world. We should feel like we have enough
• Deep religious reasons  – which I don’t know about – yet.

Ground rules

• Rent and council tax are excluded - because that would be paid for if you are on benefits. It would also wipe out my budget many times over.
• Travelcards for work is excluded – because you wouldn’t have need for a travelcard if you weren’t working.
• All other expenses are fair game – water, electricity, television, food, beer and widgets. All of them have to be covered by £63.40 a week.

Are we being annoying goody two-shoe Christians?

Absolutely not. However, I realise that there are criticisms and issues which I be discussing in future blog posts.

Track my progress

As an accountant, I’ll be maintaining an online spreadsheet of my budget and actual spending. Benefits in Lent Link.

I’ve estimated that I have to slash my weekly spend in half. I’ll be blogging about my experience. It’s going to be a struggle. But I will enjoy producing the spreadsheet, doing variance analysis and fancy pie charts.

Ryanair is everyone’s most hated budget airline. Bad stories about Ryanair are an easy way to get angry. The Times lists 20 reasons not to fly Ryanair. I had a chance to form my own opinion during my weekend trip to Denmark.

Check in was smooth; Both flights arrived on time; The cabin was clean; I had decent enough legroom; And the plane didn’t suffer any loss of structural components. Rumours about a £1 charge to use the toilet were not true. Although there are plans to have passengers bring their own jet fuel.

Punctuality makes for good holidays but boring blog posts. Publishing bad news is preferable to good. But is it not better to celebrate the good rather than pull things down?

Complaints about Denmark

Amusingly, the Little Mermaid Statue in Copenhagen had been moved to Shanghai for the World Exhibition. However, I was convinced to go against the propaganda that it was worth seeing. I did not miss it.

In the end, the biggest disappointment was the terrible exchange rate, enough to turn Wagamamas from a cheap meal to a premium experience. Yes, I did travel hundreds of miles to a foreign culture to eat the same food. At least I refrained from my default choice of Chicken Katsu Curry. However, every other aspect was the same: the wooden benches, the menu, the chopsticks. The head waitress even sounded British. I might as well have been in London, except I was surrounded by a few Danes rather than hundreds of Canary Wharf yuppies. 

Ryanair, and Wagamamas, are actually quite good.

The audit profession is easily misunderstood and unjustly feared. The “How to Audit” series aims to give an insight into the world of audit while abiding by professional, legal and ethical standards.

Picture the scene: You are at a party and meet someone new. You ask for their name, which is pointless because you forget it instantly. You move onto the next question: “Where do you work?”. Fortunately for you, the person is not unemployed but does say that they are an auditor.

Suddenly, you have no intelligent follow up questions, and are struggling not to make a joke about calculators. You force yourself a polite smile and comment that it is a “nice” job. However, you actually end up communicating that you think the other person is as interesting as beige. Talking stops and you both separate and get on with the rest of your lives.

This is where you need “insider questions”. Every profession has its own vocabulary, key concepts and idiosyncrasies. Learning a few key questions will make you sound intelligent and have great conversation. However, use insider questions sparingly before you are discovered to be a fraud. Do move the conversation on to mutually interesting topics, such as the weather.

The insider questions for auditors

1) Busy season – Auditors will do a great deal of their work from January to April, often without holiday. This is because audits are conducted after the end of the financial year. This is 31 December for most companies. Mentioning these two words to an auditor will either get them talking enthusiastically or crying endlessly – be prepared.

2) Exams – This is a classic question. Every auditor has gone / is going through exam trauma. Myriad questions can be asked: Which institute?; How many exams they have passed so far?; How many exams left?; How many attempts before getting fired?; Which calculator they use in an exam?

Be sure to mention that you couldn’t work and study full time and that they are making the noblest of sacrifices.

3) Longest hours worked – Every auditor will have their personal story of the nightmare client with the 100 hour week in a tiny conference room that smelled a bit. These are the scars of audit and are worn as badges of honour. Do ask an auditor about their worst job.

4) Funny audit room moments – Cramped conference rooms, long hours, stress and green pens have a strange effect on the auditor’s brain.

5) Cool clients – Not all clients are widget manufacturers. There are interesting audit clients. Just think, for every chocolate factory and theme park there is an auditor having fun.

Pens – the key to audit. Photo taken by atomicShed

Questions to be avoided

Certain questions will annoy the auditor. Use these with care:

1) Jokes about counting beans – This instantly shows your ignorance of what auditors actually do. Bean counters are actually “mere” bookkeepers. Audit is more interesting than that. We check that the annual bean report is correct in terms of number, size, type and weight. And only the larger beans are checked, the small beans are ignored.

2) Asking for confidential information – This is illegal. However, if the auditor acquiesces to you “well-intentioned” joke then immediately phone the Metropolitan Police on 0300 123 1212. Make sure you take a photograph and then run to the nearest safe house until the danger has passed.  

3) Mentioning the tax year – There is merit in knowing that the personal tax year runs until 05 April. However, this date is irrelevant to auditors because they are only concerned with companies. If you try to work this date into a conversation the auditor will start a long and uninteresting ramble on the meaninglessness of 05 April.

4) Posing maths questions – Friends have yelled a series of numbers at me and expected rapid mental arithmetic/calculus. This is a no-win situation for the auditor. Either we’ll get it correct and it is nothing special or get it wrong and look incompetent. Reality is that these days, auditors rely calculators and Excel spreadsheets, even mental calculations are double-checked using a calculator. 

5) Why audit? – Auditing is not a traditional childhood aspiration. This question might expose a graduate’s lack of imagination in choosing a career or a personal desire for a stable income. However, numbers are the great desire for some, but would that be admitted in public?

Do insider questions work?

Insider questions are useful. Last week, I tested out some over dinner with 11 junior doctors and a dentist. I asked questions about the hours and interesting/dangerous patients. After a while, I did try to move the conversation beyond work by asking about non-work activities.

This is important to avoid being exposed as a fraud. But more importantly, no-one really wants to talk so much about work. It’s a Western cultural quirk that the second question we ask is: “where do you work?”. We define ourselves by our work but it is not where our passions lie.

Sadly, the reply to the question was: “I don’t have any spare time”.

The insider questions idea is taken from “How to Talk to Anyone” by Leil Lowndes.