Moneyblog

Regular passengers on the East Coast mainline are inured to change — and baffled as to why this transport artery cannot be run at a steady but modest profit by a private-sector operator. We recall with sadness the demise of GNER, the first post-privatisation franchisee from 1996 to 2007: part of the Sea Containers group that also owned the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, its service standards won passenger loyalty but it overbid for franchise renewal in 2005 and ran into losses; its parent went bust the following year. Then we had to put up with back-to-basics National Express East Coast, which lasted barely two years before defaulting, followed by five years

Will 2018 be the year that you finally get round to buying a new house, or even become a homeowner for the first time? If so, this week’s Best Buys – of two year fixed-rate mortgages – is worth having a look at.

Ingvar Kamprad, who died this week aged 91, was a tortured soul but a retail genius. As the founder of Ikea he sold cheap but stylish furniture to millions of what are now called ‘hard-working families’: those who want to improve their homes and make better nests for their children on limited budgets. Though his fortune does not seem to have made him happy, his stores have made a benignly egalitarian value-for-money contribution to modern civilisation and it’s interesting to list other companies that have done likewise. Here are a few for starters. Ford, Fiat and Volkswagen for ‘people’s cars’ more reliable than anything ever built by 20th-century British marques.

Depending on how your personal finances are, the new financial year either fills you with dread or joy. Rising living costs mean British people have been using overdrafts and credit cards more – and according to data from moneysupermarket.com, four million people have borrowed from friends and family. Whatever your financial situation, would you consider using a clairvoyant to find out what was going to happen to your finances? Well I did. Eager for some clarity about the year ahead, I consulted clairvoyant Karen Bashford, who describes herself as a ‘soulful business mentor’. As well as giving tailor-made Tarot readings, Karen uses her 20 years’ experience of working in the financial

Four Japanese tourists complained to police after their restaurant meal of fish, steak and water cost £243 per head in Venice. Places where they could eat for a little more per head: Paris three-course collection menu at Restaurant le Meurice £335 Maldives Ithaa Undersea Restaurant £360 Lausanne Restaurant Crissier £290 Or if they wanted to economise: Chelsea seasonal inspiration menu at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay £185

If you’ve got a chunk of money that you don’t mind having locked away for a set amount of time, fixed rate bonds can often give a better rate of return than most accounts. Here are this week’s picks of the best one year fixed rate bonds on the market at the moment. Data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk

Sir:  Sir James Dyson is right (Letters, 20 January). We need big farming; that is where our food comes from. But the elephant in the room is tax — inheritance tax and roll-over relief — which of course he conveniently skirts. Farming at this level needs subsidy precisely because land is too expensive for food production to give an economic return through income. And why is this? Because so much money chases land for tax reasons.  The massive distortion of the allocation of capital due to tax reliefs is one of the fundamental problems of the UK. The solution is not more tax, it is to reduce tax to a level

This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any other business’ column, in this week’s Spectator. In a week that felt rather starved of exciting business stories — the fat cats were evidently too busy packing for Davos — an unknown called Stapleton Capital, previously described as a telecoms investor, notched up a brief 130 per cent spike in its share price by changing its name to ‘Blockchain Worldwide’ and announcing that it has ‘seen a number of very exciting blockchain opportunities in recent months’ even if it has yet to buy into any of them. This brilliantly simple device — the cunning name change, not the cryptocurrency payment system

There seem to be quite a few bogeymen doing the rounds at the moment, but plastic is one of them. As Ross Clark wrote in last week’s Spectator cover feature, it’s the fashionable issue among environmental types at the moment – which is why the government has chosen to focus on it. There are of course pros and cons to plastic – including the debate as to whether the alternatives to plastic are even worse than plastic itself. But it’s hard to argue against the observation that one of the biggest sources of what you might call ‘unnecessary’ plastics is food shopping. Cucumbers tend to be wrapped in plastic, as

In the same song where the brilliant lyricist Ian Dury gave the world the couplet, ‘I could be a writer with a growing reputation/ I could be the ticket-man at Fulham Broadway station’, his narrator speaks of ‘first-night nerves every one-night stand’. Perhaps we are now more accustomed to one-night stand referring to a casual sexual liaison, but in the less metaphorical sense, dating from the 19th century and was later used by Bernard Shaw, it simply means a one-night musical engagement, or gig. Gig is first recorded in 1926, in Melody Maker. By 1939 it had given rise to the modern-sounding gigster, someone who plays gigs. Now in our day, it has found a

0% balance transfer credit cards can help you to save money on any existing credit card balances by enabling you to pay less interest. Here are the best offers on the market right now:

There is no doubt about it, getting a divorce is an expensive business. The average cost, according to Aviva’s Family Finances report, is £14,500 – which includes legal fees, child custody costs and changing homes. The report highlights how the cost of divorce has spiralled a further 17% since 2014 when divorces in the UK cost, on average, £12,432. It doesn’t stop there. There are also relocation costs. Those wanting to buy a new property have to spend an extra £144,600, or £35,000 in order to rent somewhere. Most people  going through a divorce don’t have money to burn – unless of course you are Ant McPartlin of Ant and

This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any other business’ column in this week’s Spectator.  Carillion is a disaster on all fronts, but my sympathies go first to the fallen contracting giant’s sub–contractors. Upwards of 30,000 smaller firms were already facing 120-day payment delays and may now have to fight court battles to get paid at all, driving many hard-pressed entrepreneurs to bankruptcy. But the political spotlight won’t help them, because Labour spokesmen who despise small business as well as large will merely use the case to attack the concept of outsourcing public services for private-sector profit. And that debate will continue to miss the central point that Carillion

London, along with other capital cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Kyoto are thought to be one of the most expensive cities to live in the world. So is London Mayor Sadiq Khan, going too far by suggesting that every young Londoner should be entitled to a bank account? The simple logic should be: if you can’t afford to live and work in London, don’t move to London. But I suppose it is not as simple as that, and the good, great and the millennials have been lured to the Capital for studying, family or work reasons. This sort of simple logic might be a tad unreasonable. In the first week

Last September, Henry Jeffreys wrote in these very pages about the trend for rare whiskies and how – if you’re thinking about investing in alcohol – they might be a better bet than first-growth clarets. He told us of how whisky writer Ian Buxton ‘told me about visiting the Bowmore distillery on Islay in the 1990s and seeing bottles of Black Bowmore 30-year-old whisky gathering dust and priced at around £100 a bottle. One sold this year at auction for £11,450.’ ‘The world’, wrote Jeffreys, ‘has gone whisky mad’. So, bearing that in mind, it will come as little surprise to regular Spectator Money readers that a bottle of very

The ISA limit for this year is set at £20,000, and with many bank accounts offering minimal interest, it might make sense to consider an ISA – no matter how small your savings might feel. Here are the best variable rate cash ISAs on the market right now, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.