Moneyblog

Pity the taxman. As reviled professions go, it’s up there with estate agents, traffic wardens and, er, journalists. Now comes the news that more than three million people may have paid the wrong tax after chaos at HM Revenue & Customs left callers waiting for over an hour to speak to staff last year. In a stinging report, the National Audit Office said that the quality of service at HMRC ‘collapsed’ over an 18-month period between 2014 and 2015. Call waiting times tripled during that time, as some customers were kept on hold for up to an hour. One in five callers – 4.2 million people – hung up after waiting an average of

On a quiet news day, not much happens if you’re a reporter. It’s tempting to sit back, surf the internet, check your social media profiles and mull over dinner prospects. Then there’s the lure of online shopping sites: ASOS, Amazon, you name it, they’re there at the click of a button. Ordering online can be dangerous. It doesn’t really feel like spending money, particularly if you have a debit or credit card set up already. All it takes is a few seconds to spend hundreds of pounds. I know because I’ve done it. Now comes the news that we are moving ever closer to becoming a cashless society. According to

The pension revolution rolls on. Next year more than five million retired people will be able to enjoy the new ‘pension freedoms’ and cash in their annuity. I imagine the daytime TV ads are in the pipeline already, showing cheery pensioners completing the Daily Telegraph crossword in their new conservatory, or heading off into the sunset on a luxury cruise. It’s not hard to see why many pensioners might be looking forward to this opportunity. Not because they want to waste their hard-earned savings on fripperies, but because many will be unhappy with the annuity they were forced to buy at retirement. Until recently most people bought an annuity with

Buried in the Queen’s Speech this week was an unassuming little sentence that could transform our collective ability to deal with the ruthless financial services industry – but don’t hold your breath. The Government signalled that it is bracing itself to take on the challenge that has defied all of its predecessors – to produce a widely accessible, State-backed source of financial advice. The Queen said: ‘A new money guidance body would replace the Money Advice Service and be charged with identifying gaps in the financial guidance market to make sure consumers can access high-quality debt and money guidance.’ Details so far are sketchy, suggesting that the new scheme has

Your current account provider is probably rubbish value for money and you’d be better off switching banks. That’s the message the Competition and Markets Authority put out earlier this week. The watchdog reportedly spent £5 million on a lengthy report that took ages to write, £5 million to do what I just did in one sentence that took seconds. Maybe the CMA should have hired me to pen the report and saved the taxpayer a fortune. But I digress. Of course, the CMA is correct in its findings and consumers really should be more aware about the value their bank account offers them and the merits of switching. The savvy ones

My phone rings. ‘Hi, it’s your editor here. We need an article in a hurry, it’s a bit of an emergency. Can you do it quickly?’. I reply: ‘Yes, but I’ll have to raise my rate by 500 per cent.’ My career at The Spectator would be pretty short-lived if I tried that on. But it’s exactly what plumbers do – and they get away with it. A new study from Direct Line Home Insurance has revealed the so-called ‘plumber premium’ if you need a tradesperson to fix a leak in an emergency. While the average increase in a plumber’s hourly rate for this kind of work is an imposing 117 per

There’s a whole swathe of wannabe parents buying pets to ‘practise on’, according to recent research. More than two million British dog owners bought their dogs to limber up for a baby, the Direct Line survey found. Meanwhile, a third of dog owners without children feel like parents and one in 20 childless dog owners believe owning a dog is more work than having a baby. It’s hard to know whether to feel more sorry for the dogs or the children. Babying a dog is a sure-fire way to psychologically destroy it and if you reckon that pampering a pooch is anything like the mind and body annihilation that comes

When Equitable Life is no more – and it won’t be long before the death bell tolls – there will be a belter of a book to be written about all the shenanigans that have taken place at the mutual. Although the savings institution goes back more than 250 years, it is the last 20 years that are the most entertaining and lurid. Over this period, customers’ savings have been pillaged, policyholder has been pitted against policyholder, greed and incompetence have shone in the boardroom (nothing new there, ed) and there have been love affairs at the highest level (a certain former chief executive falling in ravenous love with a

As your mourners assemble at the churchyard to say their final farewells, you want them to be thinking of you fondly – don’t you? The last thing you need is them cursing under their breath because they’ve forked out for the funeral or arguing about how to split your art collection because you failed to include it in your will. But it seems the vast majority of us are making life troublesome for our family and friends at the time of our departure. Only a quarter of the population has bothered to speak to their nearest and dearest about what they actually want from their funeral. Burial or cremation? A bamboo coffin or

Am I a ‘doomeranger’? If a new survey is to be believed then, yes, that’s exactly what I am. In a twist on the phrase ‘boomerang generation’ – used to describe young people who, not long after leaving home, move back in with their parents – some PR whizz has coined ‘doomeranger’ to mean adults who return to the nest years after moving out. These so-called doomerangers (who make up 14 per cent of the population) often have families of their own and have been forced back in with mum and dad after a bad break-up or financial problems. Thankfully I didn’t fit into either of those categories when, five

When I was first getting on the housing ladder in the late nineties, the idea of taking out a mortgage you never intended to pay back was pretty normal. Interest-only mortgages were widely available to first-time buyers like me. It was a good way to get us onto their books. Over time, as I did, we’d convert to a repayment version, and everyone’s happy. In the post-financial crisis world, though, borrowing or lending debt never intended to be repaid is frowned upon. The self righteously prudent (or just plain rich) are dying to crow to those left stranded with a decreasing choice of interest-only mortgages that ‘it’s people like you

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs is unlikely to be your favourite government department. But you have to pity the poor bean counters. It can’t be fun spending all day sending brown envelopes across the country in the hope of collecting enough tax to save the Chancellor’s blushes on Budget day. But now the tax office has gone too far in its pursuit of our money. Last week it emerged that grieving families had been sent demands to pay tax on inherited pensions. You might think that sounds entirely reasonable – after all, we’ve all heard Benjamin Franklin’s famous adage that death and taxes are the only certain things in life. However, in this case the rule

One of the starkest trends in recessionary Britain is the ever expanding army of the self-employed. Among the staggering 4.4 million people who work for themselves are 166,000 taxi drivers, 140,000 carpenters and joiners and 123,000 farmers, as well as more prosperous lawyers and computer contractors. These workers have few perks: no paid holidays or sickness cover. They make up one seventh of the workforce but, also, sadly, according to the Department for Work and Pensions 22 per cent of them have no pension. My own family experience bears this out. I am one of the youngest in a family of seven children: four siblings are self-employed, but only one

It’s official. I’m a grown up. I have a baby on the way and my husband and I have just ordered a new family car. We checked it had the Isofix car seat fitting system, selected the window blind option for the rear seats and made sure that our travel system (which seems to be the new name for a pram) fitted comfortably in the boot. The make and model we’ve gone for is a bit of a step-up from the 11-year old Ford Focus we’ve been tearing about in for the past six years, so rather than wipe out our entire cash reserves we decided to go for a

Are women sleepwalking into a retirement nightmare? That’s the suggestion behind new research published by investment group Fidelity. It revealed that while women’s average retirement income is likely to be around £5,000 less than men, almost twice as many women have no idea about their pension pot or its payout. It’s not the first time similar worrying research has been published. Last year Scottish Widows reported that women save 38 per cent less than men and that the gap that has been getting wider in recent years. More worryingly, 21 per cent of women have no pension savings at all, compared with just 9 per cent of men, reckoned Prudential.

When the baby-boomer generation bought their first homes they were typically in their twenties, took out a 25-year loan, and fully expected to be mortgage-free long before they hit the big Six-Oh. Bring on the cruises and the two-seater sports cars. With an empty nest, no debts to speak of and a final salary pension, life for some really could look like those ads where elegantly greying couples wandered hand-in-hand on the beach. Ha! That was then. Today’s first-time buyers are far more likely still to be paying off a mortgage well into their sixties and possibly beyond. Borrowers are signing up in ever greater numbers to ultra-long term loans of 30

Monday’s Work and Pensions Committee session on intergenerational fairness further ignited the debate about the hardships facing today’s younger generation. Views from witnesses, including Paul Johnson of the IFS, Shiv Malik of the Guardian and Philip Booth of the IEA, did little to dispel the perception that as far as the intergenerational fairness debate goes, the older generation are winning hands down. Today’s pampered pensioners currently enjoy a raft of benefits including non-means tested fuel allowance and a triple-lock protection on their state pension. This ensures their state pension rises every year by the highest of price inflation, earnings growth or 2.5% and has been described by experts as both

‘That’s Asda price’ is a thing of the past. The slogan’s long gone and so, it appears, is the retailer’s commitment to offering customers value for money. The regulator has just singled it out by demanding a written pledge that it will change its ways when it comes to promotional deals, which have been criticised for being somewhat dodgy. Asda was far from alone in over-egging its special deals for customers. The regulator’s been investigating most of the big UK supermarkets since consumer group Which? launched a ‘super-complaint’ last year, after finding evidence of misleading prices. However, what sets Asda apart from its rivals is that it was the only