Martin’s Blog…

I’ve just read a press release titled “MyEquifax.co.uk Welcomes New FSA Guide As Survey Reveals 72% of 18-25 Year Olds Have Up To Three Credit and Store Cards”.

Why is such ignorance being perpetuated? We should not be judging the severity of debt by the number of cards. The best credit card users should have 5 or 6 different cards for different purchases (as explained in the credit card section). It’s not how many you have, but the outstanding debt combined with the rate of interest and your ability to repay that’s the problem.

These trite oversimplifications help no one - Equifax the credit reference agency should know better.

Discuss this blog entry

Alliance & Leicester has just sent out a press release on the following: “With US
Independence Day just around the corner, Alliance & Leicester is encouraging new
customers to declare independence from their existing bank and switch to…. etc.”

Without doubt the most tenuous release I’ve seen in ages, though to be fair at
least its account is the market leader (see Best Current Account article). You’d
be amazed how many press releases I receive from poor performers extolling their
products. They’re filed in the bin in seconds!

I moved house this weekend. What a horrible thing to do. Not only that but I realised I am useless when it comes to these things. Of course I can wire a plug, yet fixing a doorbell, working out how to get picture hooks in without breaking the wall, and worst of all how to decorate are not my thing.

Luckily the house is already set up and decorated, but buying the little things to make it look nice is a nightmare for me. I have no taste. I seem to get it wrong at every turn - the candles in a bowl my best friend’s girlfriend suggested….. How was I to know the red candles wouldn’t go with the green bowl? - they don’t give you lessons on these things. Think I may just stick to telling people how to buy things cheaply. My stint on changing rooms is a long way off!

Just watched a hilarious final story on Newsnight. In it Jeremy Paxman argued the tie has had its day. He interviewed Channel 4’s Jon Snow who said “to be taken seriously on news programmes in a serious subject you have to wear a tie!”. Well for three years I’ve never worn one, and hope I’m taken seriously. So all in all Mr. Snow I think you’re talking pants not ties!

Discuss this blog entry

Last week I went with four friends to a ‘bra’ party. Don’t worry, nothing salacious. It was in aid of the Playtex Moonlight walk for Breast Cancer. As it happened of the roughly 200 people there, only eight of the men actually turned up wearing a bra and four of them were my friends and I.

Now my nice black number was bought, fresh that day, from discount retailers Peacocks. To be honest I don’t know many 40C-cup women, so decided that was the easiest way to go - it cost me £3.50 for a swanky black number, which was then manfully (or should that be womanfully) stuffed with some party balloons.

The idea was to attempt, if possible, not to be too effeminate and to wear my normal clothes, just with a bra! Two of my other friends had used the maternal route to source their bras. However the fourth member of the group, who shall remain nameless, decided to go the charity shop route.

His was a little lacy pink number, stretched widely and unstuffed! It was bought from a local charity shop that day for £1 - undercutting me. Yet as a bloke, it’d remained unwashed. Now apart from the obligatory jibes of ‘wearing a sadly deceased grandmother’s bra’ the worst moment came with a text message I received three days later.

“You know that bra I wore? I’ve bloody well got a fungal infection in my nipple because of it”. Now you see, even I have to admit cheapest isn’t always best!

It’s just been pointed out to me by a very junior member of the MoneySaving team (he wasn’t so junior before the comment!) that my age in my biog hasn’t been updated since my recent birthday. However, as I have kindly explained, there are bigger priorities on the website, such as making as many articles as possible up-to-date and we really shouldn’t focus on the trivial things. It will be updated when we get round to it and I have kindly turned down our developer’s offer to write an automated script to do it! I think there’s a conspiracy!

I think I can retire now! My own trail done by Michael Winner just for me on Radio 2 today. Is there any more to do? Funnily enough when I heard it the first time it didn’t sink in properly. Then the second time I thought “that’s cool, that’s very, very cool!�.

I’ve nabbed a copy of it:

Calm down Martin

Calm down dear.

It’s 1.54 am. I’ve just returned from a night-club. As in most these days there was an attendant to turn the tap on, give you paper towels, and allow you to spruce up. Now I’ve no particular objection to this, nor even to the £1 if you choose to avail yourself of their service.

However, what I find annoying is there is no option to just wash your hands yourself. There is no spare sink. Now admittedly tonight, I decided I was simply going to do it myself anyway. I had no cash in my pocket at the time (honest gov) so washed my hands, took the paper towel and left.

Yet many blokes didn’t. Male toilets are never the most sanitary of places, and all these drunk blokes (I’m actually not a big drinker, and was driving tonight anyway, so didn’t have anything) therefore went to the toilet, took a pee, and left without washing their hands.

How marvellous it is that this ’service’ in the toilet, means that dirty, urine-soaked, unwashed hands are all over a club; touching glasses; touching other people; touching themselves. The nightclubs need to show a little responsibility, rather than simply pricing people out of hygiene.

Discuss “Paying for toilets is un-hygienic”

I did a terrible thing yesterday. Walkers has a promotion on its crisps packets to win a 50p off Pepsi, and I won (hoorah). Yet I left the voucher on the table in the bar where I’d ordered. Now this may seem a small thing, but you don’t understand the MoneySaving office.

While my passion and venom is reserved for companies screwing people out of their cash, Andrea (as in Andrea’s freebies in the tip, my MoneySaving Senior Researcher and Planning Editor) is the ‘waste not want not’ specialist. Worse still, when I write the blog it’s Andrea who checks it for spelling and understandibility, so in a way this is the confessional booth.

Sorry Andrea. I won’t do it again.

(Andrea’s note: Pah!)

I was doing a quick ten minutes on Sky News the other day, and in make-up (yes even with my, ut hmm, flawless skin I get it) was the lovely Kay Burley, the afternoon presenter (and according to her biog, three times voted the ‘most desirable woman’).

She leaned over and said to me “I love your website, it’s set as my home page. I saw it said to do it and clicked the button, it’s really great”. Now this, in my book, makes her even lovelier. So come on TV, radio and newspaper folks, I know a couple but hands up if you’re a MoneySaver. Send me an email at martin@moneysavingexpert.com.

In the chat forum, talking about debt advertising to kids, someone wrote “advertisers think that anything goes these days: 3.45pm Channel 4 the ‘do you have erection problems?’ ad. Even my 14yr old was horrified. Someone needs to take a stand and well done to Martin.” I love the phrasing!

I’ve just come back from lunch with Liam Halligan, the economics editor of Channel 4 news. Bit of a catch up, networky type thing. Anyway, as we were chatting he mentioned to me a speech he’d made in Japan explaining that the Wizard of Oz was actually all about the Gold standard (the yellow brick road) and deflation.

In fact the whole thing, it is argued by some, is all about money and politics e.g. Toto is a prohibitionist apparently. Don’t know about you but it puts the Munchkins in a whole new light to me. Next thing you know it’ll turn out Silence of the Lambs is actually a skit on Barclaycard’s lending policy!

According to one site I found this is who the characters represent (some of it requires a serious knowledge of US history)

• DOROTHY = Traditional American values
• TOTO = Prohibitionist party, also called the Teetotallers
• SCARECROW = Farmers
• TIN WOODSMAN = Industrial workers
• COWARDLY LION = William Jennings Bryan
• MUNCHKINS = Citizens of the East
• WICKED WITCH OF THE EAST = Grover Cleveland
• WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST = William McKinley
• WIZARD = Marcus Alonzo Hanna, the Chairman of the Republican Party
• OZ = Abbreviation for an ounce of gold
• YELLOW BRICK ROAD = Gold standard

PS. Try a websearch putting the ‘Wizard of Oz’ and ‘deflation’ in the search box, you’ll find lots of info.

There’s a new trend in utility ads these days. Today I’ve seen both British Gas and British Telecom on the TV flogging ‘welcome back, return to us, we’re not such bad guys’ type of advertising. It follows what happened in the USA about five or six years ago when the big incumbent providers decided to hit the fight back.

The argument always focuses on service rather than price, and tends to have ‘customers’ saying “the connection was bad”, “what about safety?”, and “someone you can trust” type phrases. These are powerful ads and many people fall for the hype.

It’s very clever. I’m a great believer in the ‘they’re all crap at times’ philosophy which means all companies do some good and some bad when it comes to customer service. I can’t tell you the number of times people have e-mailed me to say “a few weeks ago you were saying Acme was the top MoneySaving provider of widget services, but let me tell you about my experience”. After listing a catalogue of disasters the person’s call at the end is often “please warn all your readers, and please stop telling people about that company!”

Then the very next e-mail is “I can’t thank you enough for telling me about Acme, it’s saved me so much money and been an absolute revelation, thank you so much.”

And this is the point. Companies do have differing service levels, but as a whole none are perfect. It’s one of the reasons my focus is price. Providing they generally do the job, then if the price is the best, they’re the MoneySaving recommendation. Of course if it’s awful service and unworkable, then it’s wiped off the list, but I only remember that happening once (it was Gio Internet).

So when I see these ads I think, how clever. Target anyone who’s had bad service anywhere else, and try and get them to come back to you on the pretence of being a trusted brand that they remember fondly when of course it doesn’t mean that a). the problems wouldn’t have happened anyway b). their customer service is any better c). there aren’t many other companies, barring the pants one you tried, who could do it better.

So my call to you is simple. If you’ve switched your current utility provider and you think they’re pants, of course feel free to shift elsewhere, but don’t go back to these big boys unless the price justifies it. Try another new provider. Many work extremely well. Don’t overspend due to the fear factor.

OK it’s Friday afternoon, so I refuse to write anything about Money. In MoneySaving towers we’ve been discussing the Karate Kid series of films. Obviously 1 is a classic and then they rocket down. However the crucial part of the discussion revolves around the move ‘The Crane’, the iconic kick done by Daniel-san, under the tutelage of the almost mythical Mr. Miyagi.

So there’s Daniel on one leg, on the stone, hands in the air, other leg in the air half-cocked. So the question is ‘what exactly is the crane?’ My thesis is that it involves being able to kick an opponent in the face, using the foot that’s on the floor, then land it back on the floor without ever being able to put the other foot down. Wax-on, wax-off, wax-lyrical.

I’m still fuming slightly over my mobile phone smash and grab encounter. The police are investigating, but there’s no CCTV and I didn’t see his face. Yet what puzzles me is ‘why did he steal the phone?’ After all it’s blocked and blacklisted so that it can’t be used by any network, so what does he have to gain?

It was done in a very professional and practiced way. This wasn’t an opportunist. The police have informed me that the thieves are targeting this street as MoneySaving Towers is in a media office complex, so it’s rich pickings.

As a good journalist I wanted to know why someone would steal the phones then. Not for 10 minutes of call time that’s for sure, as grabbing my phone this way is covered by the robbery squad (theft with violence) and therefore is not trivial.

The answer it seems is the phone is only blocked in the UK. It can be sent abroad and unblocked and un-blacklisted there.

This must mean (supposition only) that there are gangs behind the robbery who then export phones; I doubt the 18 year old who actually stole the phone runs an international trading firm himself.

I’ve just calmed down.

Nightmare day yesterday. I was just leaving MoneySaving Towers for a meeting, and some little (insert your own swear word) on a bike, grabbed my mobile out of my hand. I chased, even shouted for people to stop him, but I couldn’t catch up.

The frustration is immense, it’s not like the phone can be used, I blocked it quickly, what’s the point - I’m tempted to say I would pay him for its return, but then you just encourage phone-kidnap.

Anyway, the real eye opener was reporting it to the police to get a crime number. After twice holding for over 20 minutes and not getting through, I went down to my local police station, Hammersmith. After queuing for 20 minutes, a very sweet but very new PC took down my details. The entire process took her forty minutes. I hadn’t seen the face of the (swear word again) who took the phone. I only knew his coat.

The questions they have to ask are ridiculous. How much is the phone worth? It’s a mobile for heavens sake, there’s no such thing, it depends on network, upgrade, subsidy. Yet the really annoying thing is the waste of police time in order to get a crime number. The same’s true even if you lose your phone. I, and many others, are perfectly capable of filling in a crime form, and saving the police time, putting more on the street to stop the crime happening in the first place. The sheer 6-page bureaucracy was ridiculous.

Rant over (still seething though!)

Don’t worry my head isn’t getting (even) bigger. I’m just quite chuffed that the techies have developed one of those little icon thingies, so if you have the site in your favourites list we now have our own mini-graphic.