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What lies ahead

The peso-dirham exchange rate will stay at its current range before hitting P14 again around October, remittance centers say.

Pinoys will still go to the malls despite VAT. More jobs ahead as Expo 2020 is just two years away. More overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) will sign on real property investments back home and travel, while others will start to finally put closure to past relationships by going for annulment or go to the UAE to move on from a devastating love affair back home.

This and more in 2018.

Peso-dirham exchange rate…tataas pa uli yan!

Peso dirham exchange rate...tataas pa uli yan 1
There’s a post-holiday lull in the rate, said Edwin Punzalan, AVP of Banco de Oro in the UAE which has Direct Remit partnership with Emirates NBD. “Katatapos lang ng padalahan ang the rates are medyo steady – yung inflow ng remittances tuluy-tuloy dahil sa holiday kaya ang trend ay pababa,” he said. (There was a steady inflow of remittances due to the holidays which was why the trend was for the rate to go down.)
Punzala said the rates will “most likely stay at the current levels for some time before starting to move again.”

Michelle Sanchez, UAE Exchange’s corridor head for the Philippines, echoed Punzalan’s remarks, saying: “Tataas ang rate on average P13.9 to the dirham.” (The rate will go up on average at P13.9 to the dirham.)

By end of the year, she added, “sasampa uli sya ng P14 gaya ng sa October last year.” (It will hit P14 like it did last October.)

She attributed this to two factors: no new fresh investments coming to the Philippines at the moment coupled with the current global market interest rates.

Peso-dirham exchange rate as of writing was P13.65

Shopping pa more!

shopping pa more 1

Despite or perhaps because of the Value Added Tax (VAT) introduced at the start of the year, Filipinos won’t be shying away from the malls, making notes of scheduled sale events like the ongoing, world renowned, annual Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF), which ends on Jan. 28, 2018.

“It’s a behavioral issue; the mindset of Filipinos when it comes to buying things,” said financial advocate Franz Ramirez Angeles of Money Talks UAE, noting how Pinoys came out in huge numbers during DSF’s opening days.

She said financial advocacy groups like theirs will be working doubly hard, round the clock this year to reach out to as many OFWs possible and “convert them from being spenders to savers so they could become investors and entrepreneurs.”

Adding to the “shopping galore mode,” experts said, is the economic growth seen to be enjoyed further by UAE and the Philippines.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) economic growth to nearly triple this year with the gross domestic product expanding 3.4 percent from 1.3 percent in 2017, Bloomberg has reported. Dubai’s output, the report further stated, citing IMF estimates, “will accelerate more moderately, to 3.5 percent from 3.3 percent in 2017.

The World Bank, on the other hand, has projected a 6.9% growth for the Philippines, saying in a recent report that the country is on a “strong growth path.”

Condo in their minds.

condo in their minds 1

But while a lot of OFWs tend to use shopping as a stress-therapy of sort, especially the young, the more mature ones appear to be bent on doing something more economically productive for their hard-earned money as a recent TFT survey has shown.

Some 45% of the 2,000 Pinoys interviewed about their New Year’s resolutions, said they are looking at signing on a condo deal back home with 25% of them saying this will be their first.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

Global real estate think-tank Colliers International, in a recent report detailing its top 10 predictions for the Philippines in 2018, said “opportunities abound” for the country’s property sector in the next 12 months.

Overall, the report said infrastructure-led GDP, which surpassed market expectations when it rose by almost 7% in the third quarter of 2017 and whose year-to-date growth stands at 6.7%, will buoy property.

More jobs ahead.

more jobs ahead 1

As the much-awaited global event, World Expo 2020 draws near, being just two years away, more and more job vacancies are being opened, with officials saying the actual number could run into hundreds of thousands.

Indeed, according to local media reports, analysts had predicted that the employment sector would enjoy a “short-term boost” from hosting event “with approximately 200,000 jobs expected to be made available.”

Clicking to the Expo 2020 site will show job opportunities for a host of positions from visitors center associate to event technology managers, pavilion designer and film editor.

Other openings are for those in the fields of accounting and finance, arts, entertainment and publishing, customer service, hospitality, information technology, construction and consultancy services.

Travel holidays.

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Owing to its affordability these days – thanks to technology which has made everything available online, ergo not anymore necessitating time at the travel agency – travelling has become within reach of the average person, OFW included.

Travel experts said 2018 will see more OFWs spending time at destinations like Georgia and Armenia this years, travelling not only once and timing their trips during eid breaks.

Along this line, OFWs are seen to be more travel-savvy, being wary of destinations that offer cheap fares but are actually expensive to stay at when they land like Denmark or Iceland for instance.

Moving on in Dubai.

moving on in dubai 1

This year will also see more Filipinos coming to Dubai, not to look for jobs but to move on from a devastating love affair back in the Philippines.

Alexie Banyaga (not her real name) had done so and she believes a lot of likeminded Pinoys and Pinays back home will be finding Dubai as the place to go to start over again.

“The best way to go is fly away, not really to escape but to go for new beginnings,” she said.

Dencio Henares, a fastfood service crew, for his part, said he left his special someone in the Philippines as they had mutually agreed the relationship was going nowhere. “Ayawan na because it has become emotionally draining already for both us. I chose Dubai because it’s a wonderful place and within reach in terms of visa entry,” Henares said.

Annulment and divorce.

annulment and divorce 1

A touchy issue that has never failed to strike a raw nerve, especially with the Catholic Church, the legal dissolution of marriage is an issue affecting more and more OFWs in light of situations where the husband or the wife stays abroad for a long time, their absence resulting to the breakdown of the relationship.

Back home House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez has introduced legislation seeking a legal dissolution of marriage. Lawmakers have embarked on a series of consultations with OFWs abroad, having gone to Hong Kong last year on its first leg, and from which the proposed measure got overwhelming support.

Lawmakers said more and more OFWs, emboldened by the Hong Kong results, could be filing for annulment or wait it out till the measure manages to be signed into law.

Currently and in the absence of a divorce law in the Philippines, civil annulment is a recourse to end marriages. But this is expensive and time consuming, where a lawyer needs to be hired for a packaged fee of from Ph70,000 ($1,400) to Ph120,000 ($2,400) with the whole process taking from six months to four years to be consummated.

New jobs from new technologies.

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With the juggernaut of information technology moving forward, several jobs, even college courses, have disappeared: from video shop clerks to postal workers or travel agents.

This in mind, OFWs, embracing change are seen to be wont to take relevant crash courses to keep them abreast with time, remain bankable as well as competitive, and enjoy a piece of the action.

There are hundreds of lucrative IT-related jobs to get – from being an application developer to cloud architect, web developer, database administrator, network administrator, front-end developer, programmer, software developer, and so on.

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