Moneyblog

I thought I’d be a pretty cheap date on holiday abroad this summer. I’ve abstained from all alcohol for the past eight months, including my beloved Siglo rioja, as I get ready to become a mum. So I expected the savings we’d make by only one of us drinking while on our road trip through France and Italy to offset the crazily expensive road tolls we clocked up as we travelled through the Mont Blanc tunnel, passing over the top of Milan to get to Venice. Boy, was I wrong. In most of the restaurants and cafes we visited it was actually cheaper to order a glass of wine than a

As acronyms go, it’s a good one. PANK. It stands for ‘Professional Aunt, No Kids’. I’m a fully paid-up member of this group, a 40-something professional woman with little interest in kids of my own but an overwhelming love for my sister’s four-year-old daughter. Now I can’t pass a newsagent without buying the latest Peppa Pig magazine. Browsing the shelves in toy shops for Nemo and Dory has become a popular past-time. And I know all the words to the Sofia the First theme tune. New research, conducted by Opinium for Spectator Money, shows I’m not alone. PANKs lavish an average of £352 a year on their nieces and nephews, with

Sitting on the lanai (balcony) sipping a beer, the wind gently rustling through the palm trees and my Hawaiian hosts’ adorable puppy licking my toes: life was sweet. I’d struck gold. I was living the Airbnb dream. David and Doug treated me like one of the family, complete with days out and home-cooked meals. Nothing was too much trouble. When they dropped me off at the airport (no extra charge), we vowed to be friends forever and I cried the whole flight home. I experienced Airbnb exactly the way it was meant to be – living like a local with the locals. But back in the UK it’s a different

Statistics. Like so many things in life, it’s easy to bend facts and figures to support an argument or make a point. Brexit exemplified that and then some. And so it is with pensions data. Following this morning’s publication of the first full year of pension freedom information, the headlines varied from paper to paper and website to website. ‘Some taking too much from pension pots’ said the BBC. ‘Retirees prove more prudent than expected after pension freedoms’ reported The Guardian. ‘Insurers warn that some people may be plundering pension pots too soon, raising concern money will run out’. That last one was from Thisismoney, part of the Daily Mail

We are fast approaching a time when massive tracts of this fine country of ours (greenfield, brownfield, urban, rural) will be bank-free zones. Villages and towns stripped of their last bank. Goodbye pub, goodbye convenience store and now goodbye bank. Yes, ultimately goodbye community. Last week’s disappointing report from the Competition and Markets Authority on how to breathe fire into the static current account market will do little to arrest this decline in the bank branch. Its authors seem besotted with the digital age, prattling on about a future dominated by digital banking and open competition. It’s as if the bank branch was already a thing of the past. Over

How I long for a detached house with a drive – and, more importantly, no neighbours. My current abode is a three-bed semi with no off-street parking. It’s a free parking street but before you think I’m boasting, it’s also close to three primary schools, has a corner shop and most of the residents seem to be building loft extensions. Taken together, it adds up to pretty painful parking. It gets even worse when one of the tank-driving neighbours is home as he frequently takes up two spaces, which is particularly vexing when I’ve got a boot full of heavy groceries and there are no spaces near the house. Then

A post from a friend pops up on my Facebook page. ‘It’s August 9th and the winter tights are on.’ I feel her pain. Last weekend I bought logs and smokeless fuel, and I don’t mean for the barbecue. Yesterday I went shopping wearing a cardigan, a coat and armed with an umbrella. For the love of god, where is our summer? I appreciate that living in the North of England means I’m less likely to spend June and July slathered in sun cream in the back garden but come on! This is getting beyond a joke. Thankfully, it seems that my pal and I are not the only ones reaching

The country is divided in many ways. High up on this list of divisions, perhaps even in the top five, is the one between people who have bought the property they live in, and those who rent it. This gap is wider and growing at a faster rate than you would guess. The average deposit saved to buy a house is now £33,000, according to Halifax, compared with just under £18,000 nine years ago. ONS figures put average rent rises at around 2.5 per cent a year. Mortgage repayments, thanks to lower interest rates, are low and heading down – especially if you are an equity-rich, older homeowner. The average

When I was a cub reporter, writing for the paper of record at a time when the economy was booming and weekly personal finance pages numbered more than two dozen, the phrase ‘hardy perennial’ was bandied about on a regular basis. Like the plants which reappear year after year, in this context ‘hardy perennial’ referred to the type of money article sure to appeal to readers, focusing on a topic which never went out of fashion. So, pieces on the challenges facing first-time buyers, guides to buying an annuity, that sort of thing. It’s more than 15 years since I last heard that expression. Nevertheless, it’s as relevant today as

Borrowers rejoice, savers despair. The decision by the Bank of England to cut interest rates to a record low of 0.25 per cent dominated the financial news yesterday. The last time rates were cut, back in March 2009, the world was in the grip of the financial crisis. Ah, life was different then. Leicester City were languishing in League One, Labour’s John McDonnell had been suspended from Parliament after picking up the House of Commons mace, and the Bank was pumping tens of billions of pounds into the economy as well as buying government bonds and corporate debt. Today McDonnell is Shadow Chancellor and Leicester City are about to start the new football

I recently returned home from a fortnight’s holiday only to fight to get my front door open. Not because the emptied bins had been left on the doorstep yet again, or because I’d left a key in the lock. No. Instead, a sea of junk mail had flooded my hall, jamming the door as I tried to get in. The worst offenders were local take-aways and restaurants. I counted eight Domino’s pizza menus alone, which given how long I was away means the chain must be clocking up flyer drops at a rate of at least one every two days. These were accompanied by countless broadband, TV, phone, clothing and homeware

Some years back, when I announced my decision to return to Manchester, I became the butt of a few jokes from my London pals. They mostly consisted of the usual clichés concerning whippets, flat caps and black puddings. There was also mention of ‘it’s grim up North’ and the weather. I’ll give them that last one. There’s no getting around it: it rains here. Where I live, on the border of Greater Manchester and Lancashire in the shadow of the Pennines, rainfall is such that I am constantly battling slugs and leaky gutters. Last year the floodwaters enveloped my small town. The cricket ground and the football club were completely inundated,

Last week, visiting friends in Italy, I had an epiphany in two car journeys. The first ride was in a spiffy-looking new Fiat 500 I’d rented. I’d been excited about driving this pretty update of a classic Italian design. Yet the brand new cinquecento was wheezy even as I drove it off the airport, and arthritic on the autostrada, petulantly ignoring my demands on the accelerator even as I bullied it with gearbox and clutch. Challenged by the steep ascent to a hilltop trattoria, it sputtered to a halt and demanded the eviction of two of my passengers (my hosts; a faux pas). This was a voyage of shattered dreams.

Mostly I wouldn’t suggest that too many of us pay any attention at all to letters noting minor looking changes to the terms of conditions of corporate deposit accounts at Natwest and RBS (which owns Natwest). Not so this week. This week we all need to pay a lot of attention. The letter in question notes that ‘global interest rates remain at very low levels’ – something I think we all know. But goes on to say that ‘this could result in us charging interest on credit balances’ in the event that the UK base rate falls below zero. Yes, instead of paying its business customers interest on their money,

I’m standing at the edge of a financial precipice. I’m a 32-year-old woman doing a job I love. I’ve been beavering away solidly for 10 years and I’ve been working hard to climb my way up the career ladder. After starting out in London surviving on a pitiful cub journo’s salary, I now earn enough money to pay my bills, do and buy what I want – within reason – contribute to a pension and put a little bit away each month. But within the next three months, all that will change. I’m pregnant and my first baby is due in six weeks. I’m one of the hundreds of thousands

I always feel sorry for Marley’s ghost in Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol.’ He wore a heavy chain he had unknowingly forged in life. Unlike Scrooge, Marley had not received ghostly visitors to warn him of his future burden. Marley’s chain was made up of ‘cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel.’ The chains many people are forging today are made of high mortgages, shiny new cars, and bundles of credit cards. And we are dragging these heavy debts with us into the uncertainties of the post-Brexit world. Low interest rates have not only scuppered the plans of those living off savings. They have also given borrowers

It might seem as though houses are priced in monopoly money these days – but don’t assume the roof over your head will be your ‘get out of jail free’ card when it comes to saving for a pension. It’s not hard to see why so many are lulled into a false sense of security. Many people have made thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of pounds from the property market by doing nothing more risky than buying a modest family home and living in it while their kids grow up. The boom over the last few decades can seem like the golden goose that won’t stop laying:

Finance firms love taking football fans for suckers. The latest is Virgin Money which has this week launched a Manchester United savings bond. It pays just 1.25 per cent for 12 months which is roughly two-thirds the interest you could get at the current best buy account. So far, so rubbish. But it has a neat gimmick designed to reel in optimistic fans. If Manchester United win the title next season, the interest rate paid doubles to 2.5 per cent. Sound attractive? It’s meant to. But in reality it’s a total con. And it’s just the latest in a long line of football-related finance deals that take fans for mugs.