KELA

I must admit that I have not used KELA services almost completely. Over the past twenty years, I have been in contact with KELA twice after my studies. The first issue concerned sickness allowance, and the second issue was related to the health care fee related to the current master’s degree studies and its payment. Paying the health care fee feels a bit frustrating, because I don’t use the services in question, but the occupational health care provided by the employer.

The European Health Insurance Card was a new thing for me, I may have heard about it at some point, but I have not acquired the card before. The additional cover offered by the card in addition to travel insurance when traveling in Europe is a useful feature, so I placed an order for the card.

OmaKanta

OmaKanta pages can be found on kanta.fi through the website, which also includes instructions for secure login. You should not access the site using a search engine, but by typing the official address in the browser’s address bar kanta.fi to avoid scam websites. The actual login took place Suomi.fi through the identification service using online banking codes. When I logged in to the service, I received a notification that I had logged in to the service in 2022.

Keva

When I logged in to the website, I received a notification that I had not accrued any pension at all. The website advised me to check my pension through some other pension provider, and in my case, the correct pension insurer turned out to be Varma.

My lowest retirement age is 66 years and 8 months, and my target retirement age is 68 years and 6 months, which would mean that my pension would be several hundred euros more than the lowest possible retirement age. An increase in the amount of pensions extending one’s working life is an attractive circumstance, but the issue must be considered as the retirement age approaches the end of the 2040s, unless the retirement age has time to rise higher than before. It may be that the importance of appreciation of leisure time will grow even more, and retirement will be realized as soon as the first opportunity comes.

eBay

I started as an eBay user about 20 years ago, when there were few easy options for ordering products from abroad. The ease of buying and paying, for example, with a PayPal account linked to a credit card, made shopping easy. When purchasing products, I have tried to order only from sellers with good reviews who have sold products for a longer period and in large quantities. There have been hardly any disappointments with the products, and in my case, the deliveries of the products have always arrived intact. Central Europe and the United Kingdom have often provided products for car and motorcycle hobbies that may not have been available in Finland at all. In general, the price level has also been lower abroad despite the delivery costs.

Automotive sector service carVertical

The service, which can be found at www.carvertical.com, offers a person buying a used car an excellent tool for finding out the car’s history. The reports they provide are based on information obtained from more than 900 different international databases, which include information on registration institutions, insurance companies and official repair shops in different countries. Especially when buying an imported vehicle that has been registered for the first time abroad, I think it is very sensible to invest a few tens of euros in inquiring about the car’s history.

The information may reveal, for example, mileage manipulation or damage repair history of the car, as cars that are often slightly obsolete in some way end up being sold abroad. Utilizing digitalization provides good opportunities to avoid disappointment when buying a used vehicle. Traficom also offers the opportunity to check the car’s inspection history, and the mileage recorded in electronic format during the inspections for a few euros. carVertical is a very active player in social media and a follower of car-related Youtube channels cannot avoid their advertising.

Digitalization and the digital divide

In my opinion, older people are particularly at risk of falling into the digital divide. Cybercrime tends to find easy victims, and older people are likely to be easier to trick with various scam messages and fake websites. This can cause people to not want to use any digital services to avoid problems.

Not using digital services makes life very difficult in many ways these days, and using physical services often costs more than digitally operating self-services. Nowadays, using various KELA services, taking care of insurance and banking matters, or even selling and buying a car requires the use of digital services. Many older people certainly can rely on the help of relatives and get things done.

My comments to other blogs

I commented on three different blogs, here is first:
https://blogi.savonia.fi/jorgosblog/digi-citizen/

Second blog:

DIGI CITIZEN

Third blog:

DIGI CITIZEN

Digital Competence Test

Taking the test opened my own understanding of the challenges of digital competence, information retrieval, its processing and issues related to online security. Based on the test, I have room for improvement in all areas, and I will take file backups more seriously in the future. My result was in the middle almost in all sectors.

When answering the questions of the test and looking at the result, I couldn’t help but think that there are certainly a lot of people in Finland who have almost no idea about some of the topics of the questions. Developing one’s own digital skills requires constant activity and the use of new digital applications to develop the level of competence to meet modern requirements.

Self-reflection

Doing this task “forced” me to use services that I haven’t had to use much in recent years. Nowadays, it is easy to monitor your own health data with the OmaKanta service, and you can conveniently check your pension matters by logging in to the pension provider’s website. These basic services should be used regularly so that you can somehow use them when you really need them. It is also sensible for everyone to check that, for example, pension accrual has been correctly recorded in the pension system.