The latest inflation figures showed that food prices are rising – along with petrol. This is no surprise to Money Fight Club. Part of our job is to monitor the tricks being played on us, every single week, by the supermarkets. A batch of supermarket vouchers currently doing rounds demonstrate the latest wheeze that’s designed to get us to spend more. At the till, when paying for my last weekly shop, I received a voucher that promised me five times as many points if I spent £60 or more in the following week. In other words, if I spent £20 […]
Read More…
Behavioural economics – no, don’t yawn yet While the rest of us get on with paying the bills and going to work, economists are slugging it out in grand intellectual style. What are they arguing about? Well, little old us, of course. At the centre of the fisticuffs is a big debate about whether we can be totally logical when it comes to money – weigh up the facts at hand and make coolly rationale decisions – or whether we are bound by our emotions and the merry dance they lead us across our personal financial landscape. Economic nudging This […]
Read More…
Sainsbury’s recently captured the headlines with its decision to halve the points your can earn on its Nectar card, so you have to spend twice as much to earn the same number of points as you did before April 2015. But whatever plastic loyalty cards you have rattling around in the glove box, or the bottom of your shopping bag – there’s a much bigger issue here. The fact that loyalty doesn’t pay. In fact, loyalty never paid but supermarkets (in particular) and other major retailers managed to trick us into thinking it did. Loyalty cards explained There are 3 […]
Read More…
1. WAIT Ignore anyone who offers help with liberating or investing your pension pot. Unless you have an urgent use or stupendous idea for how to use your pensions freedom right now – wait. Time costs a lot less than bad decisions. Everyone over 55 has the right to a 45 minute free consultation through PensionWise. Be wary there are plenty of organisations that will pretend they can give you the same free advice. 2. THINK TAX The tax man is banking on getting an extra £3 billion from people liberating their pension pots over the next few years. While […]
Read More…
Money Fight Club respects and wants to protect your privacy and any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us – for example, when you sign up to our newsletter. The type of information we collect We collect information you give us when you fill in forms online, over the phone, face to face or in written correspondence. We may make and keep a record of the information you share with us. This also includes information that you provide to us by completing survey or by undertaking questionnaires or quizzes, or as part of a transaction, […]
Read More…
Okay, here’s the legal stuff… Money Fight Club Money Fight Club Ltd is a private company registered in the UK. Our registered address is 12 Robertson Road, Brighton BN1 5NL. Our Company Number is 9220032. What we do We offer a range of information and resources which should help you manage your finances on this website, in associated publications, including our book and the workshops and presentations that we run. We do our best to ensure that theses information and resources are current and correct but because the financial world is complex and constantly changing we can’t accept liability as […]
Read More…
Inflation is down to zero. We are led to believe it is good news for all of us all but anyone who shops for food or even petrol regularly will know that we need to unpick that. Our supermarket bills are not coming down – whatever they claim – and the petrol costs are already on the way up again. And ‘zero’ has become something of a dirty word with zero hours contracts that give workers uncertain low-paid work, zero % credit cards that can cost us a lot more in the long run and zero calorie drinks that still […]
Read More…
For years pensions and annuities were just plain boring. The money invested in a pension was out of reach until you reached retirement age, when you would be railroaded into an annuity paying as little as the pension industry could get away with. From April 6 that all changes. Not only is the pensions industry getting ready to sell us products we did not know we needed, but the scammers and the con artists are out in force and the tax man is also liable to benefit – unless we keep our wits about us. From April 2015 the rules […]
Read More…
The 2015 Budget didn’t contain that many surprises as information had been leaking for days and at least some of it had been heralded as far back as the Autumn Statement in 2014. But it’s less about what and more about what to do next… In terms of the man and woman in the street, the key elements include: 1. Personal tax These include how much you can earn before tax and when the higher rate of tax kicks, promises of more to come. But that assumes this government and its promises stay in power. You may want to look […]
Read More…
