Latest news with #financialPressure
Reuters
9 hours ago
- Automotive
- Reuters
China's auto dealers urge automakers to pay cashbacks within 30 days
BEIJING, June 23 (Reuters) - Chinese auto dealers on Monday urged automakers to pay cashback incentives within 30 days to help to alleviate their financial pressures. The China Auto Dealers Chamber of Commerce called for quicker payment after it conducted a survey that found it could take as long as 180 days for dealerships to receive the cashbacks.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
TDSB passes new budget that will cut $34M in spending
Toronto school board cuts spending amid major financial pressure. Spokesperson says it will keep several pools open, but more money will be needed to maintain special education learning.
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
University of Suffolk proposes staff redundancies
A university has proposed to cut some of its workforce as it looks to make £3.5m in University of Suffolk said like other universities it was "under considerable financial pressure" due to reasons including rising costs and the tightening of visa rules around overseas students.A spokesperson said a consultation had begun on proposals to restructure its academic schools and the way administrative support was comes after the site in Ipswich was awarded University of the Year in the 2025 Whatuni Student Choice Awards on Wednesday. The university said it was considering "the non-replacement of a number of vacant posts", as well as a "potential net reduction of around 35 occupied posts".The initial consultation process would run until late June."Like most universities, the University of Suffolk is under considerable financial pressure due to the real-terms fall in the value of the UK student tuition fee, the tightening of overseas visa rules and rising costs, including the recent National Insurance increase," the spokesperson said."We also face an increasingly competitive student recruitment environment. "While we have an ongoing programme to maximise efficiency savings and digital transformation, we still need to take immediate action to reduce our costs by £3.5 million."The university is proposing to make structural and workforce changes both to reduce costs and to create a scalable and sustainable organisation that can thrive for the future."The spokesperson added that the university remained "committed to providing a high quality and maintaining our positive student experience". 'Secure and stable vision' The University and College Union's regional support official, Michael Kyriacou, said the announcement left it "disappointed"."As a union we stand against any measures that negatively impact on our working conditions and student learning conditions," he said. "We expect management to work with us to take compulsory redundancies off the table and produce a secure and stable vision for the future for the university that protects our members and students."The university's Students' Union echoed its concerns."It is very disappointing to hear that the sector-wide financial issues are now being felt locally," a spokesperson said. "In the Students' Union we will continue to make sure that the student voice is heard by the university, and that any impact on the student experience here is minimised." Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
The Guardian
11-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
How Charlie discovered that time wealth can be the key to a slower, happier life
Charlie* was flustered the first time I met him. He was running late, fitting our appointment into a morning of back-to-back video calls. He ate his lunch while we spoke and told me about how he feels a crushing pressure to work more and earn more. He spoke of his daily 'juggling act', his experience of being a parent, working a full-time job and trying to maintain some friendships and hobbies. He described feeling tired, disconnected and out of touch with what really matters to him. Charlie's experience is a microcosm of the modern pressures so many of us contend with today. Like trying to reach the finish line on a treadmill, we grapple with never-ending to-do lists, convincing ourselves that if we only run faster, work harder, be better, we will achieve the goals we seek. This is evidenced in so many of the 'timesaving' tricks we employ to feel productive, most of which can spectacularly backfire. Like trying to multitask, or fill every pause with activity, the evidence suggests that we are hurting, not helping, our performance and our mental health. Before we could broach the concept of time wealth with Charlie, we had to tackle the topic of financial wealth. Like many he had no choice over whether he worked or not. He simply could not afford to cut back his hours, nor did he have the time to increase his hours to earn more. He earned enough money to get by but the nagging sense that he needed to earn more was noticeably causing him pressure. We talked through the values that Charlie wants to be known by, trying to strip back the layers and understand what a 'good life' looks like to him. Charlie conceded that professional success and financial wealth were lower down his values list than he realised. At the top was being present with his loved ones, adventure and growth. Realising that growth represented many things – especially learning new things and self-improvement – helped Charlie to see that financial wealth was just one of many ways he could find fulfilment. When it came to being more present with his family and tackling the frantic pace of life he was moving at, we discussed some of the main principles of 'time wealth' (also known as 'time affluence'). Some of them were out of Charlie's control, such as how much free time he had away from work. Approaching his life at a more unhurried pace, though, was something Charlie felt he could tackle. Over the course of a few months, he began a few behavioural experiments. The first was identifying the things that he usually tries to multitask, to see what would happen if he just focused on one at a time. This meant eating meals without doing anything else (like joining appointments with his psychologist!), and scheduling intentional play time with his kids, leaving his phone in another room. Far from feeling as though he had less time after making these adjustments, Charlie noticed that he was feeling less 'brain-dead' and far more rested and present. His second experiment was to bring an unhurried pace to his working day, knowing that mindfulness has been linked to time wealth in research studies. Whereas he previously found himself tense at work, trying to furiously type out as many emails as possible while racing from meeting to meeting – his new 'go slow' mantra reminded him to breathe deeply in between tasks, to look outside the window to ground himself and to tackle one thing at a time. Charlie's final experiment was to get really clear on the 'needs' and 'shoulds' in his life and what he could afford to let go of to open up more time. Needing to pick the kids up from school, for example, was a non-negotiable – as was needing to go to work five days a week. On the flipside, Charlie was able to let go of the idea that he should be reading books every day or should be keeping the house spotless. He acknowledged that there would be a time later in life, when the kids were a bit older, where these 'shoulds' might be possible. For now, he is focused on radically accepting exactly where he is at in life right now and trying to enjoy the little moments, instead of running through life in search of more. Charlie's story is just one example of the bind that so many of us all fall into: feeling that the solution to feeling too hurried is to hurry even more. As Charlie was able to experience, very rarely does the world implode around us when we take the time to slow down, accept the limitations of our restricted time, and commit to using it in an intentional, unhurried way. Of course, the macro forces at play in society do make it substantially easier for certain people (most often those who are materially wealthy), to experience time affluence. But that doesn't mean it's out of reach for those of us who are on the daily treadmill of life trying to get by. *Names and details have been changed Dr Amanda Wallis leads the R&D team at Umbrella Wellbeing. Gaynor Parkin is a clinical psychologist and founder at Button Psychology
