The government wants you to save more. You might think that odd for two reasons. First, because if you are an average person you’re unlikely to have much extra to save; your mortgage payments may be lower than they were, but what the financial crisis has given you with one hand it is ripping away with the other. High inflation is destroying the purchasing power of your net income.
Secondly, if you watch the news at all you will know about the paradox of thrift. If we all start saving at once our horribly ill-balanced, consumption-based economy won’t be able to cope: economic growth will continue to collapse and we will all end up worse off. Still, there’s no accounting for the madness of government policy and so it is that from November you will be able to open a Junior Isa (Jisa) for your children (if they don’t already have a child trust fund) and pile whatever pennies you can scrabble out of your purse at the end of every month into it, up to a limit of £3,600 a year.
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