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Personal loans for home improvement projects are a popular reason for seeking finance. In most cases, the standard eligibility requirements are as follows:At least 18 years of ageA permanent residentEarning a stable incomeWhen applying, ensure you have the following documents handy:Your driver’s license, passport or firearms licenseProof of your employment and incomeDetails of any amounts owing, including other loans, credit/store cards and overdraftsDetails of your rent and/or mortgage paymentsProof of addressYour email addressIf you require more information on whats involved, and access to useful loan calculators and budget planners, then check out Gem Finance Personal Loans. Heaps of useful information and resources you can use and take away with you.Hope this helps.

I’ve been coming to Sweden for nearly thirty years now, and initially explored only the southern half intensely. I liked the country a lot, and made plans to live in Sweden eventually.But as the years went by, and I got to live in the Canadian Rockies, California, Arizona, and southern New Zealand, I began to realize I needed more landscape drama than southern Sweden has to offer. I grew up in the Austrian Alps. I’m a mountain boy. My focus shifted a little towards Norway then, but Norway’s precipitation data are a little frightening, and I already spoke good Swedish at that stage.Enter the chance realization that there is quite a lot of dramatic landscape in Sweden once you understand that the forests north of Filipstad are not denoting the edge of the world, from where onward you only find a few dragons and rainbows, and then you fall into space.Twenty years after first coming to Sweden, I finally decided to push the old Pontiac north of those forests, that had been my point of return up until then, and I found amazing things there.Quite unexpectedly, probably also to all my Swedish friends who, for years, had assured me that the only thing to expect up there was forest, mosquitos, and eternal night, I actually found this:Östersund - perfectly good civilisation, and it had a lake monster and mountains in the background!Sundsvall. A beautiful, elegant city that immediately made me fall in love with it:Umeå. A pure magic river city:Härnösand, gateway to the High Coast:Örnsköldsvik, another substantial city:Skellefteå. Another perfectly pretty place along the Baltic coast:And between them, lots of this:Wide-open spaces, sleepy villages with comfortable houses with ridiculously low price tags, and people who were mellow even by Swedish standards.So I had found a place that had:Landscape dramaMellow peopleCheap homesDuring winter visits, I also noticed it had proper winters, like I had come to appreciate in Canada. Powder snow, temperatures of minus thirty Celsius, clean blue skies, and snow on the ground solidly from November to April:The Canadian in me, who had been bored out of his skull by soggy, dark, lifeless winters in England, New Zealand, China, France, and all those places, really woke up then. This is what I wanted! Half a year of snow paradise every year.Now I only needed to find a job. Which was a bit like saying “now I only need to win the lottery”. Jobs aren’t exactly something found in abundance in that part of the world, which is the size of Germany, but only has about as many inhabitants as Montana. And I wanted to be a university lecturer in industrial design, as that had been my career for twenty years already! It was basically like saying “I’m going to be a design professor in Montana!”It sounded hopeless.Especially considering that the places where I wanted to work weren’t exactly mum & pop style jungle outfits grateful to have someone who could read and write, but absolute star performers in my field. The Umeå Institute of Design is considered one of the leaders in the world. It’s like an MIT in the middle of Alaska or something.But miracles happen for the determined, and a few years of rabid vigilance and consistent applications to all the right places in Umeå, Östersund, and Sundsvall eventually landed me exactly the right position, and we made the jump, from England.I had already bought a house, years earlier, from the comfort of my office in Shanghai at the time. A steal at 16,000 Euros, for sure. Nothing at all wrong with it, just situated in an area where no one wants to live, who knows why. If you ask me, it’s a puzzle. I couldn’t imagine a better place to live if I tried.So what else do we like about being here, and how is it better up here in the North than it would be in the South of Sweden?The atmosphere is different. Sweden is nice overall, but when I come to the South, I feel it is busy there, the people are operating at a higher level of stress, or shall we say, you can actually find the odd, stressed person, which you can’t in the North; the whole place up here is humming with a vibe that is somewhere between an old “Lassie” movie from the 1960s, a bit of lumber jack romantics, and a touch of something I would describe as “fairy song” - sung in an ancient, local language, and you can hear it when you make your way through the deep, old forests. A bit like the music of the Swedish group Hedningarna.The pace. When you live here, you think in entirely different, chronological dimensions. Like a Paraguayan stevia farmer, or an urban budget planner. The idea may occur to you that the garage roof should be renewed. The year after, you call some guy. The year after that, he calls you back. You decide to do it the year thereafter. And that’s good enough.The freedom. It’s not just a buzzword here. A lot of people here live mortgage free, drive old cars that were paid off decades ago, and generally aren’t in the rat race at all. My neighbour is an old guy who has been working casually at the local saw mill for fifty years whenever he felt he needed a little money, and otherwise tinkers with his old Volvo, or his apple trees, or goes hunting. Of if I feel it’s a hot day, I get up from my couch and walk down to the lake, and jump in. Naked. Nobody cares. There’s nobody there, to begin with.For me, northern Sweden is the embodiment of everything I ever appreciated about Sweden. A European Canada, with big lakes, deep forests, quaint villages, and elegant cities, in a seasonal climate that tends toward the dry and sunny side.If there was another place like it on the planet, I would know.

My divorce.I’d made a goal when I was 21 to have a house, husband and child by the age of 30.By 23 I was buying my first house with my fiance and planning our wedding. I'm ashamed of how I acted and looked down on people during that time in my life. I couldn't understand how people had no savings and couldn't afford to buy a house. I thought they must be extremely irresponsible with their money. They didn't plan their life out perfectly like I had.My fiance started to act a little weird a few months before the wedding. I chalked it up to the new pressure of a mortgage.We got married and went on the honeymoon. When we got back he went to work and stopped coming home. He made excuses that he had to work very late and slept at his mom's for convenience since she lived close to his work. After a week it didn't make sense. I cried to him over the phone asking him to come home. He begged me to let him go to his hometown in Mexico. He said after a week there he'd come back and everything would be ok.Long story short….while he was in “Mexico” a woman was posting pics of him at HER place, in California. He was cheating on me. There was a peaceful exchange where she said he wasn't even supposed to go to the wedding and that he told her we were getting divorced…while we were on our honeymoon. He was lying to her too. Lies lies lies….The result was me being saddled with the mortgage. I had to rent out my new house so I wouldn't default on the loan….I couldn't afford it alone and house prices were drastically decreasing…I couldn't sell it.I got divorced after 1 month of marriage and had to move in with my parents. I had no savings because I had planned and paid for this huge wedding. I rationalized that the big budget was ok because I'd be able to save up later since we would both be paying the mortgage.Everything was thrown off…not part of the plan. The man I married had a secret life. I had banked on a future that was a sham. At that point I attempted to commit suicide but thankfully my mom sensed something wasn't right and came to the rescue.My sister and niece moved in with my parents as well, which moved my sleeping space to the floor.One night, while dwelling on how hard the floor was against my back, I saw my past-self clearly. How arrogant I was…how superior I thought I was. I then realized that there are things that can't be planned for…and that's just life. Sometimes you'll fare better than others and sometimes you won't. I wasn't a better planner or saver…life just hadn't gotten to me yet. That's when I was truly humbled and stopped looking down my nose at people.A second wave of humility came after all my coworkers found out what happened. At work, both men and women found time to tell me their stories of failed first marriages. They all let me know that it was a blip in their past and life goes on.Now, I catch myself when that feeling of superiority starts up. I stomp it down by reminding myself of that time when I thought my plans were perfect. And, when I see things going well for another couple, I really am happy for them. They get to experience the innocent happiness I once had and I hope they feel it forever.