Moneyblog

Used properly, a purchase credit card is often the cheapest way to borrow – but make sure you pay back what you’ve borrowed before the interest-free time is out. This can be for anything up to 31 months, as you can see in the data below. Here are some of the best 0% Introductory Purchase Rate Credit Cards on the market at the moment, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

This is an extract from this week’s Letters pages in The Spectator Sir: One objection to an increase in National Insurance contributions to rescue the NHS is that it would once again exempt from contributing those who most heavily use the NHS — the retired — and heap yet more of the burden on the working young who least use it and can least afford it (‘The Tory tax bombshell’, 17 March). As you acknowledge, National Insurance contributions long ago ceased to be purely contributions into a pension and sickness benefit scheme, and became part of general taxation. This means that entirely exempting retirees from contributing when many of them are

Is there really a cross-party consensus on tax rises for the health and social care system? A group of MPs from across Parliament has written to Theresa May calling for a year-long parliamentary commission on funding for all branches of the health system. Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt is calling for a ten-year settlement for the NHS, attacking a ‘feast or famine’ approach to funding it. ‘There’s no doubt that NHS staff right now are working unbelievably hard and they need to have some hope for the future, but their real concern is this rather crazy way that we have been funding the NHS over the last 20 years,’ he told ITV’s

This piece first appeared in The Spectator The maximum amount you can save in an ISA for the tax year 2017-2018 is now £20,000. The maximum annual pension contribution is £40,000. Counterintuitively, these huge allowances are actually a disincentive for ordinary people to save. With a £5,000 ISA maximum, a modest saver had an impetus to save each year for fear of missing out; with an ISA ceiling of £20,000, anyone can postpone saving until next year. But you don’t have to be a Marxist to wonder why a household which can save £60,000-120,000 a year is in need of extra help from the state. Figures released this year by

Serious and organised crime, from drugs and cybercrime to people trafficking, costs the UK economy an estimated £24 billion a year. The majority of proceeds are laundered through UK banks and other regulated businesses, and includes money from international criminal activity or corruption. Not only is money laundering a serious crime in itself, this practice plays a wider role, allowing criminals to fund and expand their operations, and financially impacting regulators, businesses and governments in the fight against it. The National Risk Assessment (NRA) goes further, stating that there is ‘a marked overlap between money laundering and terrorist financing’. Money laundering transfers financial power from legitimate businesses and individuals to  criminals, whilst undermining financial institutions

If you’re on the hunt for a mortgage, a fixed rate one will ensure that your repayments stay the same. Here are some of the best rates available for five-year fixed rate mortgages on the market at the moment, according to data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

It is always a pleasure to spend time in the company of Messrs Neil, Nelson and Forsyth. True to form, an evening of lively dialogue, in a packed auditorium at the Royal Institute of British Architects, discussing the implications of the chancellor’s spring statement last week, did not disappoint. Prior to the event I have to admit to being a tad gloomy. This had less to do with the cold I was nursing, and more to do with a call I received recently from a broker friend of mine. He told me that one of his clients, running a multi-billion dollar global equity fund out of New York, had just

Human progress has depended on economic disruptors since long before the advent of the internet. The internal combustion engine was a hugely significant invention, but motor cars remained rare luxuries until a disruptor called Henry Ford perfected the assembly line that enabled the Model T to be mass-produced at a price the ordinary citizen could afford. If we define a disruptor as an entrepreneurial business that radically changes its own marketplace, numerous examples spring to mind, from the low-cost no-frills airline to the flat-pack, home-assembly bookcase. Today’s online auction, home-stay, ride-share and crowd-funding sites have generated markets and money flows that barely existed before, to the great benefit of providers

Last week, the New York Times ran a very un-New-York-Times-y article, ‘Resentment Grows Over Who Gets Health Care Aid’. It contrasts two women in New Hampshire. Married with one child at 30, last year Gwen Hurd paid more than $11,000 for her family’s health insurance, purchased through the Affordable Care Act exchange. They had to shell out $6,300 per person — $18,900 — before the insurance kicked in. Both parents were working. Their pre-tax earnings just exceeded the $82,000 cut-off for government insurance subsidies. The couple dropped date night, and couldn’t save for retirement. A few miles away, single and living at home, an aspiring opera singer of 28 is careful to

If you can afford not to have immediate access to the money in your account, then a notice account often gives a better rate of return than other accounts. Here are the best ones available at the moment, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any other business’ column, in this week’s Spectator.  Unilever, the consumer goods conglomerate formed in 1929 by the merger of Margarine Unie of Rotterdam with Lever Brothers of Port Sunlight, is a model of cross-Channel collaboration that pre-dates the European Union we’re about to leave. So the decision due this month as to whether the group will no longer maintain dual head offices — which means closing London but keeping Rotterdam — will be highly symbolic. If the move not only goes ahead but also entails doing away with dual fiscal entities and dual stockmarket listings, Unilever will henceforth be a wholly

A spring without a Budget is a bit like one without the Grand National or the Boat Race. It doesn’t feel right. The sight of the Chancellor’s red box, regardless of its contents, has always instilled in me a frisson of elation as one contemplates the warmer, sunnier months ahead. We do, however, have the consolation of a spring statement, which Phillip Hammond will deliver next Tuesday. What can we expect? Very little, if the briefings are anything to go by. Hammond has let it be known that the occasion will not mirror the autumn statements of the Brown, Darling and Osborne years, which were used as a second opportunity

How do you go about choosing a pension plan? For many of us – especially if you are part of a workplace pension – it’s something you tend to just accept. Bearing that in mind, the recent research done by Portafina into the response times of various different pension providers might make you think twice about simply accepting whichever pension scheme comes your way. While the most responsive Defined Contribution pension providers took a relatively short time to provide basic information needed to advise clients ­(just over a week), the worst performing schemes took over five weeks to provide similar information. When it comes to Defined Benefit (Final Salary) schemes, the

If you have credit card balance on an existing account, you could save vast amounts of money by transferring that balance to another card. Here are this week’s selection of the best cards with a 0% introductory balance transfer rate, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.