Kate gets a one-of-a-kind birthday gift from the Queen
By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - 0 Comments
The Queen and duchess of Cambridge in June in Nottingham (Samir Hussein/Getty)
When the birthday girl is already living a fairytale, figuring out how to mark her 31st birthday must be a nightmare.
But not for the Queen. She didn’t shop online for a nice cashmere scarf to hide Kate’s baby bump or a gift certificate for a new pair of platform shoes. No, that’s just too, well, ordinary. Her Majesty used her position–monarch, head of state, you get the drift–to declare that all of William and Kate’s children will be given two titles: the first is “prince” or “princess” before their Christian name and the second is the HRH honorific.
Here’s the rather spartan official announcement in the London Gazette:
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Generation spend
By Erica Alini - Monday, November 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 9 Comments
Today’s youth are set to become bigger consumers than the boomers
Jemal Countess/ Spencer Platt/Getty Images
“If I want something I want it, no matter what,” says Kezia, one of the protagonists of a new Slice TV series Princess, where Til Debt Do Us Part host Gail Vaz-Oxlade tries to put young, female serial shoppers through personal finance rehab. A makeup artist who normally makes “probably” around $30,000 a year, Kezia would shed up to $355 a month on her hairdo, and eat out “probably” four times a week. “I don’t ever look at my credit card statements,” the pretty (dyed) blond says, gazing dreamingly at the camera. “As soon as they come, I throw them away.”
Twenty-five-year-old Kezia belongs to a new species of consumer whose capacity to spend will surpass that of the boomers sometime in the next decade. Variously referred to as Generation Y or Generation Next, they are loosely defined as the age group going from kids in their early teens to young adults. In the U.S., eight- to 24-year-olds are expected to spend $224 billion of their projected $348 billion annual income, according to Harris Interactive, a market research and consulting firm. Yet the percentage of those who have no savings at all is over 50 per cent. The stats in Canada are equally troubling. For young adults, the proportion between the ages of 25 and 34 who say they are impulsive spenders and can’t save is 30 per cent, a figure very similar to the 31 per cent found among the so-called Generation X (or 35- to 49-year-olds), according to a recent study by the Royal Bank of Canada.
