Claim now and claim often for delays on trains. Too many commuters and other passengers are letting the rail companies get away with running late trains without claiming what they can. The companies still do not make it easy but money is available for delays of 15 minutes. The companies are saving £100m a year because travelers do not claim what they can. With fares up 2.3% this year the compensation can help. Southern Rail claims it is running a normal service from today, even though ASLEF, the train drivers’ union, and the RMT union is still banning overtime. Southern […]
Energy bills rise 28%
Just as the cold weather is arriving the cost of my household energy bills are increasing by a whopping 28% and there is more to come. I am not alone. Anyone who has been on a fixed price tariff that is coming to an end will find their costs are increasing similarly. And the companies are getting away with it without any adverse publicity because they are not putting up their standard tariffs yet. Their fixed rate tariffs are under the radar, although they have been used by the energy companies to demonstrate that they are not making much profit […]
Retailers should refund customers for faulty goods
Retailers are keen to get us into their sales and seem to have forgotten about the items we paid good money for before Christmas. Faulty items are a nuisance so are the customers who bought them. We all need to tough it out. Yes it is worth taking things back for a refund. A very small example has caused disgruntlement in Money Fight Club Towers. A pair of cashmere socks bought as a gift were wrapped up by the sales assistant with the security device still attached. First of all we were annoyed that the retailer thought so little of […]
Feudal leasehold contracts trap buyers
Two leasehold triumphs today but there is still a long way to go. Leasehold, a feudal form of tenure unique to England and Wales has been trapping home-buyers for decades with contracts that cost them dear. Today Taylor Wimpey, the builder, has said that it will no longer build new leasehold houses with ground rents that can double every ten years. These leases have trapped buyers, who have been unable to sell on their properties. Last year 95% of all new properties sold in London were leasehold and 670,000 of houses were leasehold in England and Wales, including 2,829 new […]
Beware supermarket vouchers
We are in Advent. The trees are up and the Christmas shopping lists are made. And every time we go to a supermarket we get another voucher offering great riches…or not. You need to be wary not to be conned into spending more than you would normally and to understand how little you will get with some of the offers and how many hoops you will have to go through to get any cash at all. And the stores are probably hope that the lure of points will take your eye off the price of the food on the shelves. […]
Don’t be fooled by energy companies
Don’t be fooled by the apparent generosity of the energy companies that have frozen the price of gas and electricity until at least the end of the winter. Their marketing people are earning their money with their full page advertisements published on the coldest days so far of this winter telling us that they are not putting prices up. What the ads did not tell us is that the companies bought their gas electricity in the wholesale markets when prices were much cheaper. And they are only freezing their already very expensive standard variable rates. They are not however freezing […]
Energy bills unfair to all
The chancellor announced in his Autumn Statement that the domestic energy bills are to be looked in to by the Government to make sure they are fair to all. It cannot come a day too soon….and no doubt it will not be soon at all. The company’s tell us that they are making minuscule profits on our energy bills because they have historically used the cheapest tariffs for their calculations. They could then say their profits were only 4% on a typical customer. But if they used the standard variable rate it would be much higher. And all this was […]
The poor need help to get better deals
I met the personification of the spirit of Money Fight Club when I was a fellow panelist at the Money Advice Service’s Financial Capability Week at the QEII centre this week. Vanessa Simao is a trainee with the Young Women’s Trust in London and an outreacher in Barking and Dagenham so she knows that to help clients in her work she has to share her own experiences as a single parent. She knows what it is like to take a loan to provide food or heating and then to get behind and agree to consolidate the loans into one payment […]
New inflation index is hollow victory
Someone in Government has listened to us and finally recognized that buying and owning a house is expensive and getting more so. The Consumer Prices Index that has been favoured by the Government to assess the rate of inflation has ignored mortgage payments, council tax, buildings insurance and estate agents costs. It replaced the Retail Prices Index devised in the First World War, which includes all these costs. This sleight of hand has meant that the official inflation rate is currently 1% while the traditional RPI which is 2% is ignored by the authorities unless consumers are paying. It is […]
Service charges horror for flat owners
Leasehold, a unique form of tenure unique to England and Wales is preoccupying us this week as so many buyers of flats are hit with unexpected bills. First of all I am helping a group of flat owners who have been hit with a 30% surcharge on their service charges, which seems bad until you hear of a young couple forced out of their home by the cost of their service charge. Yes, the charges must under law be reasonable and management companies must account for their spending but both the cases above demonstrate how hard it is for people […]