Spectator money

It’s one month until Easter and if you’re planning to make the most of the long weekend or the school holidays with a trip abroad be sure to also make the most of your travel money purchase. The fall in the value of sterling since the Brexit vote last June has made foreign holidays more expensive. The price of February half-term ski breaks was up nearly 12 per cent on average, according to M&S Bank. And while £1 would have got you €1.27 a year ago through the currency exchange and money transfer website xe.com, yesterday that had fallen to just €1.14 – a reduction of more than 10 per

This week’s Best Buys, provided by Moneyfacts, are Unsecured Personal Loans.

If you’re a Manchester resident, you’ll be familiar with the all-singing, all-dancing, brand-spanking-new Co-op headquarters. In much the same way that London’s City Hall squats on the banks of the Thames, One Angel Square looms over Victoria Station, its solid glass bulk in stark contrast to the company’s iconic 1960s CIS Tower just over the way. The UK’s largest building when it was completed in 1962 (this title was later claimed by the capital’s Millbank Tower), the former home of The Co-operative Group is a relic of a bygone age. To step inside is be transported back to the grey vision of mid-20th century town planners. Once a jewel in Manchester’s architectural

As a nation, we obsess. We obsess about the weather, taxes, the state of the roads, death and the cost of milk. I could go on. And there’s one other thing uppermost in our minds: house prices. I’ve lived in the same place for six years but I still can’t pass an estate agent without glancing in the window. I keep a close eye on house prices in my local area – are they, up, down, static – and I regularly calculate the amount of equity in my property. Yet I have no intention of moving. I’m not alone in all this, which goes some way to explain why house

It’s an increasingly familiar scenario: grown-up children moving out of rented accommodation and back into the family home as they save for their first property. For some, the idea of coming together under one roof again conjures the return of family movie nights and getting to know your loved ones afresh. For others, it will be a case of making the best of living in a familial and financial pressure cooker.   So, what are the ground rules for parents and grown-up children thrown together again, and what are the best ways parents can accelerate the moving out date?  To live harmoniously, charity Family Lives suggests agreeing upfront that the ‘child’

This week’s Best Buys, provided by Moneyfacts, are One-Year Fixed Rate Bonds.

It’s been a painful week for drivers – and it’s only going to get worse. Insurance costs are set to soar and tough new penalties have been introduced for common motoring offences. Together these could cost drivers hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds. Here’s a look at what’s changed and how you could be affected. Rising car insurance costs     On Monday, a change to the way compensation for personal injury claims are calculated was announced by the government that will make it much more expensive for insurers. The ins and outs of the issue make for pretty dull reading (although the Daily Mail has a useful guide here)

How far do you think £321 would get you from London? Halfway across the world maybe? Asia? The US? All of these are possible if you hunt around for cheap flights. But in the wonderful world of UK train travel, £321 of your hard-earned cash buys you a return trip from London to Manchester, a mere 326-mile round-trip. There are cheaper train tickets, admittedly, but that’s the price a client paid for me to travel to Manchester to do a day’s (high standard and very reasonably priced) consultancy work for them. Their big mistake was not to book the ticket three months in advance or tie me to set trains

You’ve saved for years into a defined benefit pension scheme in the expectation it will provide you with a secure and comfortable retirement. Then, without warning and through no fault of your own, the company supporting the scheme goes bust, plunging you into uncertainty. That’s the worry faced by members of many of today’s nearly 6,000 private sector defined benefit schemes. After a number of high profile cases and much recent focus in Westminster, last week’s pensions Green Paper was expected to propose real solutions for these schemes which pledge to pay out an income based on how much you earn when you retire. But what did it actually say? Firstly

Dinner table conversations these days prove that you don’t have to be an estate agent or work in the property industry to have a view on the UK housing market. Just a look at the headlines and stories on housing which appear in the media every week is further proof of the country’s interest in all things bricks and mortar. But in the media it’s more likely to be agents or industry specialists giving their view, rather than homeowners or renters in specific parts of the country. Yet the sentiment of homeowners and renters plays an important role when it comes to the housing market – not least in determining

This week’s Best Buys, provided by Moneyfacts, are 0% Introductory Purchase Rate Credit Cards. For more information on how these cards could work for you, read this Spectator Money article.