Martin’s Blog…

It’s quite fun to see how the other half live sometimes. I’ve just come back from the Cartier Polo event, the big glam social event of the polo calendar. Rather conveniently my agent also looks after Cartier, so the MSG and I managed to get an invite to a star studded event at Windsor, in the VIP tent with full sit-down celeb ‘Mossiman’ lunch.

Most of the guests were society people, and to be honest I’ve simply no clue who they are. Yet there were also lots of media people, and quite a few newsy types (much more my comfort zone), but Hollywood was represented too with Micha Barton and Juliette Lewis.

At lunch every place had a hand fan on it, not the modern battery powered type, but the old fashioned wave it yourself type. And afterwards, while nipping out to watch the polo (don’t cha know), as it was hot we took it with us. In the stands we sat next to Justin and Colin the TV designers/house makeover experts, who I’ve met many times before and get on well with.

They also independently (through Five TV) know the MSG and were delighted with the gossip that we were together (also they’re setting up a big new online highly resourced home selling site, and I think I may’ve managed to blag MoneySavers some freebies… we’ll see).

However the funniest moment came when discussing how to fan yourself and yet still look manly. Sitting in front was Michael Buerk; and Colin and I were daring each other to ask him - well it’s a wee bit cheeky to ask an award-winning war correspondent and reporting legend, but who better? In the end I braved it (as I’d been talking to his wife about what the cheapest telephone provider was - she’s an 1899 user and I was suggesting using the CallChecker and 18185) and said “Michael you must know, how do you hold a fan like this and look manly?”

He said let me me show you….. took the fan, folded it up and said “YAH!”, at the same time rapidly jabbing it in my stomach (don’t worry it wasn’t hard) then feigning a chop on the back of my neck with it, followed up by “that’s the only way to look manly with a fan.”

Lesson learnt!

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A couple of weeks ago in my weekly email tip I highlighted Nectar’s Summer of Rewards offer allowing half price CDs. It went in the email, which as many of you will know goes to 600,000+ people.

Sadly towards the end of the send out an ‘out of stock’ note came up on getting the CD’s half price. Yet there’s been no obvious indication that this was a limited stock offer before, and the nature of the offer meant that it wasn’t an obvious thing. This left many people missing out.

I spoke to Nectar about this, and expressed my disappointment. Rather nicely it’s come back to me to say it’ll be amending the website to make that more obvious for the rest of the promotion…. and you never know, fingers crossed it may decide to re-do the CD promotion at some stage in the future based on popularity.

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Just seen my face (in fact my face a few years younger, they seem to have used an old photo) smiling out of the pages of Hello! magazine; as I wrote its weekly Comment piece. Actually it’s something I’m quite proud of, to have got the UK’s financial literacy, our attitude to debt and credit, into a mag of this genre really helps widen the audience for the MoneySaving message.

I actually wrote the first incarnation of it a few months ago, and it was on hold until a relevant peg - thankfully the 40th anniversary of credit cards was it - so I rewrote the beginning and bish-bash-bosh.

By coincidence, next week or the week after (these things are always fluid) the MSG will be appearing in the prime competitor OK! mag in a slightly difference context. She’s doing a fashion shoot, where they take someone off the TV, talk about their fashion and take pics of them in the latest schmatte.

Now it’s nice for us both to be in the mags… but sadly for me I think the MSG’s got more options in there for the future. After all it’s possible at some stage in the future the MSG could write a comment piece…. but I certainly can’t see me ever being asked to do the fashion shoot. Ah well

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Addendum 1 August…. just seen the OK with the MSG in, seems they put a pic of us together in too. It was taken the other week as we were walking around the Motorshow. One of the photographers recognised the MSG and asked for a shot… surprised they knew who I was! Normally they just ask me to stand aside.

A spontaneous round of applause just broke out in MoneySaving Towers. Having had the air conditioner on order for a while… it’s arrived! Thank heavens – it’s been sweltering in here, as anyone who saw my video podcast yesterday would testify - 38 degrees, fans turned off for noise, and a bright hot light pointed at me.

Now all hands on deck to get it working hooray (and watch, bet the heat’ll end today!)

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The redesign is coming on apace, so I thought it was time for you to have another peek at the latest incarnation of the home page. Do remember this is still very much a work in progress, and you’re only seeing an illustrative image of what it looks like, rather than a built HTML version. There are still quite a few more tweaks to make.

One of the major redesign keys is the navigation structure. I’m sure you’ll spot the ‘tequila sunrise’ navigation buttons at the top. Each of these sections is now divided into up to three sub-sections e.g. Travel and Transport is, unsurprisingly, divided into a Travel section and a Transport section. And there will be a clear path to help people work through to exactly what they’re looking for. We’ve also done some mock ups of how the articles look in the new structure, and it’s much cleaner.

It’s a very difficult balance redoing a site like MSE. I very much don’t want it to look corporate, or have the same feel as one of the commercial money sites. Yet at the same time it needs to be clear and easy to use. There’s a lot more white space than in the current incarnation of the site, but hopefully not too much that it blends into the monotony of current web design trends.

Behind the scenes the site is coming on well, we’ve started building the background machinery, but there’s still a lot more work to do. One of the next steps is looking at the forums, though actually there will probably be less change there than anywhere else.

After that we’ll be ready to get a site user panel up and running to go through and give proper feedback - but until then I wanted to keep you updated.

For more details of the planned redesign (and previous incarnations) read this blog and this blog

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I’m on the train back from Cardiff, where I’ve been filming for ‘the One programme’ which’ll run every weeknight for a month starting mid-August on BBC1 at 7pm (sadly I’m not on every night, just once a week!). After filming in Stratford yesterday with Nancy who was considering an Equity Release scheme, today it was recycling mobile phones to see how much cash I could get for 10 chicks (as they referred to themselves), celebrating the forthcoming marriage of their friend Tracie.

We were at the luxurious St. David’s Hotel in Cardiff, where I’d stayed the previous night. Though sadly not in the massive suite we were filming in. It was decked out with their ‘pyjama party’ decor, filled with champagne, chocolates, sweets and the like.

The days most bizarre moment was twenty minutes into filming. Gina, one of the chicks, said “do you know who you look like, that financial guy who does all the money stuff on the telly….” and then quickly added “though you’re much better looking than him though.”

I pointed out he was me, but she seemed to mishear and said “it’s uncanny though you really do look like him…. I watch all his stuff you know, the one who tells you about saving money on credit cards, mortgages, phones and stuff”. I again pointed out that it was me to which she said “noooo…. really, I don’t believe it.”

Now this is slightly bamboozling after all it’s one thing for people to be uncertain when they walk past on the street…..

(As I’m typing this out on the computer sitting on the train, rather ironically the guard just said to me “I love your stuff on the telly, can I just ask you a quick question about my debts….”)

yet here we were sitting in a hotel suite, filming with cameras about MoneySaving stuff!

On with the filming which was a lot of fun. A great mix of characters, from Susan whose kids had told her “don’t drink and don’t speak on the telly”…. which she nervously told me on camera with a glass of champagne in her hands, to Michele. Michele is a site user and often on here, though totally separately she’d coordinated the filming with the producers. As a glamorous blonde, she was determined to ensure her elegant nails were pristine and in shot every time the camera passed!

I must remember to go on a hen night again….

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Just had a call from GM-TV. They’re looking at a story about cash machines and how that in many of the UK’s poorest areas there are only cash machines that charge you to withdraw cash. And they are calling me wanting some ‘righteous indignation about the banks’ in an interview on this, expecting that’s what my opinion would be.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. I don’t blame the banks one little bit for this. Now it’s important to be specific - I think the lack of transparency in cash machine charges is terrible, and they should be forced to display whether you’ll be charged or not on the cash machine itself, and not wait until you’ve been through the process.

Yet why should banks provide cash machines in areas that aren’t economically viable for them. It is still free to withdraw money from bank based cash machines; though not always from bank’s cash machines that aren’t based at a bank. So this is an issue of whether or not they have branches in certain areas.

Most charging cash machines aren’t owned by banks but owned by cash convenience companies - who simply run their own ATM network, which is connected through the link network. So it’s important to understand what would actually need to happen to get free cash machines there.

Convenience cash machines operators shouldn’t charge? Well if they didn’t they wouldn’t be any of those type of cash machines, simple as that. That’s not necessarily too terrible, except it’d mean people in those areas which have no other cash machines would have no facilities.

Are we saying bank’s should have to keep or reopen branches, and thus free cash machines? How can we say that? A bank is a commercial company, its job is to make money from us. We have to learn bank’s aren’t there as some socially responsible body to aid society, they’re there to screw us. The sooner people learn that, the better they’ll behave as consumers. So what right do we have to say banks should keep unviable banks open? None. It’s their decision, we can give them or take our business from them as we feel fit, but we can’t start expecting them to provide unprofitable services, that’s not capitalism!

Are we saying we should regulate to enforce banks to keep branches open? Well this way we do have a right to say they should keep them open - but who pays… we all do, in the form of higher charges all round. Again I don’t say this is such a bad thing, but we need to be aware, if we take the commerciality out of the equation for the banks, we’ll be the ones who pay.

Should the government offer free cash machines? Another viable option, but again the question is - who pays? The answer; we will through the taxation system.

So whatever way you look at it, we end up paying to have free cash machines in areas of poverty. That for me is a political decision, and not an issue that belongs to the bank. They are simply money making organs, who are not responsible for bettering society so as such it’s not fair to berate them for this.

Ultimately I think the real cause of this problem is relative short sightedness on behalf of the politicians. It’s switched benefits and pension payments towards bank accounts rather than the post office, and forget that commercial factors would impact that so people can’t get their money out for free. Maybe the real solution is allow nice basic banking at the post office with guaranteed opening hours, decent service, and the ability to withdraw cash at no cost there.

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Update Note 12 Sept 2006. This Charitable fund is now being set up. In the meantime until 19 Sept you can Vote, for which of the nominated charities you’d like a third of the money to go to.

I’ve always been very proud that as part of running this site, I’ve been able to donate a portion of the revenue generated to charity (see how this site is financed). In the last 12 months or so I’m really pleased over £75,000 has been donated, and since the site began way over £100,000.

Over the next twelve months, I predict as much as £150,000 could be donated. Currently much of this money goes to five charities nominated and voted for by site users (see charity fund).

What happened to MoneySaving Kids?

Last year I launched a feasibility study to see whether it would be worthwhile and possible to set up a MoneySaving Kids charity for half the money to go to. Having read the report, and having seen massive developments in the moves to aiding financial education I feel MoneySaving Kids would just get lost within it and the time it would need dedicating simply isn’t feasible.

Why I want to set up the charitable trust?

It’s still my aim that this site makes a difference. Having thought long and hard about it, I propose to do the following (and I’d like your feedback on it).

I will set up a MoneySavingExpert.com Charitable Trust, which will be a charity in its own right. The site’s charity cash will then be paid to the charity. Fifty percent of this money will still go to five charities as nominated by the site’s users, just like it is now. With the remainder of the cash the trust will be grant awarding. The exact aims will need careful drafting but essentially it will be to promote, aim and educate consumer awareness.

I did consider awarding money to help people out of debt, but the funds aren’t there to help more than a few people and to do proper hardship fund checks on who is genuine and who isn’t would simply be unfeasible. Thus I prefer having money that provides long term awareness. E.g if someone wanted to do the Open University personal finance course but couldn’t afford the fees, then the trust could help. If a charity wanted to run a money education project or trip for schools, the trust could help. If someone wanted to develop a non-profit board game to teach children about money, the trust could help. This is the type of thing the money could be used for.

How will it be organised?

There would be a group of trustees, including me, but also a couple of, I hope, eminent people, plus a representative of the site users on board.

I’m delighted to say my father has agreed to be Chief Exec of the charity - he’s an education and charity specialist, so it’s perfect. As it’s real work he will be paid for doing so, however I’m going to meet all his salary costs and all other admin costs personally, so that every penny donated goes to the charity fund will go to a deserving cause.

Will others be able to donate?

Many who’ve been helped by the site often ask to donate - especially those who’ve received large endowment misselling compensation (see article). Currently I decline their offer, but in future I hope to be able to suggest people donate to the Charitable Fund.

When will it happen?

Soon. Provided people thing it’s a sensible idea, my aim’s to get it up and running within the next few months. At that point I will launch the vote for the site’s new charities, set up a MoneySavingExpert charity fund website, and we’ll work out the logistics.

Have your say

I would love your thoughts and feedback on this. However please don’t get into the logistics of how it’s done - I have some great professional volunteers who have agreed to help with the structuring and legals. To have your say just click the link below.

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It’s one of those questions I seem to be contacted about all the time…. “Dear Martin, the wife/husband and I are getting on a bit, and we want to get some money out of our house, can you suggest a decent equity release scheme?”

And it’s not surprising: we are a nation where house prices have risen vastly more quickly than incomes, thus many people have high wealth and low income (wealth is a measure of your assets, income of the money coming in). Therefore in essence the question is asking ‘how to I convert wealth to income?’

In its usual salivating way the financial services industry has been quick to respond with ‘equity release schemes’. There are two main variants: either you sell them some or all of your house which you can then live in, usually rent free until you die; or they give you a loan, which is paid off when the house is sold upon death. The problem is when you look at these schemes they’re usually incredibly expensive and you only get mere fractions of what the house is worth back.

To be honest I’ve still not ever seen a scheme which I feel I could ever say “this one is a reasonable bet”, every one leaves me cold and scared for those who take it out. Even those people with no heirs are giving up a huge chunk of their accumulated wealth (which they probably already spend years paying interest on in the form of a mortgage) to have some extra cash now.

Is there anything that can be done?

The easiest (well financially anyway) option is to downscale your house. This is often an emotive issue, but actually by far the most effective way to release value is to sell up and buy somewhere smaller, or less expensive. Of course for some that isn’t possible, but many in this situation are in the position after the children have left home, and have an empty room or so.

It’s important to do this early. One of the great problems is that the older people get the less they willing they seem to be to move. When you’re 50 or 60 it’s not too big a deal, but often people say “I’ll do it in retirement”, this then get puts on hold, but speak to people aged 85 about moving and, even if it makes financial sense, there’s an obvious resistance to doing so at that age. Thus it’s important to try and do it sooner.

What if equity release is the only option?

There are some who will be willing to pay a possibly huge whack, to be able to keep their current home and have extra cash. I’ve chosen not to write on ER as I’m simply not happy with any options, thus the most I can help with is to say, go and read what the financial regulator, the FSA has to say in its downloadable PDF guide to equity release

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There’s a wee bit of under-education in the UK when journalists write about websites, usually they quote it in terms of hits e.g. ‘it receives 1,000,000 hits a day’. Yet this is absolute bananas: while a million a day sounds huge, it means absolutely nothing. A hit is an irrelevant stat that purely depends on the way a website is designed rather than used.

A hit on a website is counted when someone takes a single piece of info…. on any webpage there could be tens or hundreds or thousands of pieces of info. So someone could manufacture a page with 100,000 pieces of info…. thus one web-user clicking ten pages is a million hits in a day.

The real traffic measure should be ‘unique users’, which is the number of different people visiting a site each month. Due to the way it’s measured it can never be completely accurate but it gives a strong indication of size. Next best is visits, the number of different individual visits made…. thus one person visiting every day in a month is only one unique user but 30 visits.

As you can see, hits is thus perhaps the least relevant measure, and most easy to manipulate, which is why many sites, especially small ones trying to look bigger, quote it.

Obviously I’m interested in the stats because I like to see how big this site is. For info here they are:

Unique Users: 1,000,000/month
Visits: 2,000,000/month
Page Uses: 26,000,000/month
Hits: 230,000,000/month (it used to be twice that, but we made the site more efficient and it halved - even though pages and visits increased, showing just how irrelevant hits is as a measure!)

In fact when I’m looking at a website I tend to go to Alexa.com and put the website details in there - then click to see the traffic report. It gives you a stat of a website’s current worldwide ranking (done over the last three months). E.g. Yahoo is 1 (the most used site in the world), BBC.CO.UK is 23, Lastminute.com worldwide is 750, MoneySavingExpert.com is 2,900, Sainsbury.co.uk is 21,000. This is very useful to give an indication of how legit a site is - any site in the top 100,000 is worth considering with legitimacy as it means it has some level of traffic, in the top 10,000 has substantial traffic.

Therefore the next time you read a site amazingly has 1,000,000 hits, maybe do an Alexa search and see when this site is really a giant or a tiddler.

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Update Note

A new ranking site has just been suggested to me … metricsmarket.com. A bit like Alexa, rather than rankings it gives rough visit numbers for a site. Unlike alexa which relies on user data, this one relies a bit more on ISP data. The results are interesting. Comparing its stats for MSE to the actual stats (from the server statistics) it rates MSE lower than its real figures, but in roughly the right scale (ie it says 1.4 million visits in the last 30 days compared to the real 2.1million figure).

Suffering jet lag today, never too much fun. We arrived back from our US holiday at 11am yesterday morning, having missed the nights sleep due to the time difference. Luckily I had what I think of as the poor-mans upgrade, in other words an empty plane which meant I had three seats to sleep on (don’t worry so did the MSG, I wasn’t being selfish). Even so with belt buckles digging in, it isn’t that easy.

Now for some reason I always seem to get recognised by Flight Crew. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that they’re comfortable approaching me as they’ve a reason, whereas most people feel shy to say hi; or that they watch a lot of daytime TV. Either way whenever I seem to fly, one of the stewardesses (or stewards) tends to say hi.

This time was no exception, on both legs of the trip. Coming back the stewardess said to me, “it’s you isn’t it?” Now I’ll be honest, I always find this quite amusing, after all…. who else would it be…. normally I’m a wee bit mean and say “depends which me you think it is,” but as I was shattered this time I just said yes. Turns out she was a MoneySaver, which is always fun.

Yet this is my problem…. how come it’s always the people on the airline, why not the people on the airline desk. One day, fingers crossed someone will say “Martin, love the site, let me give you an upgrade”

Ah well, I can hope.

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P.S. Before anyone asks, yes I did book via the Cheap Flight Finding methods and I even re-read my How To Get An Upgrade article before I left but sadly no luck!

Rather annoyingly travel to the US, as I’ve just done, and it’s very tough for non T-mobile users to get anything like a decent price for making or receiving calls on the mobile cheaply (I’m in the middle of a full update of the mobile roaming article, which will detail all this). Thus Skype is a saviour.

For those who don’t know, Skype is one of the internet based calling systems, where using a headset plugged into a computer you can dial a normal phone (for full info read ‘Completely Free Calls Via The Internet‘ article). Now for dialling from the UK there are cheaper methods (see UKs Cheapest Home Phones article), but in a hotel overseas, where it’s going to cost £1/min to make a call from the mobile and £3/min from the hotel phone - suddenly Skype comes into its own.

To connect my laptop to the hotel’s wireless cost $10 a day (roughly £6), after that it was $0.02 (about 1.2p) per minute to call the UK. Thus after 6 minutes Skype’s cheaper, and as we saved up our calls in batches, and I was connecting anyway, the cost was virtually negligible in comparison. Horrah for the web!

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If someone had told me those words would ever be true….. yet happily they are (well mostly). I’ve just come back from holiday; the MSG and I decided to do a big trip to Los Angeles and Las Vegas - 9 days away in the sun, and it was fantastic.

The new Superman film was showing, a couple of weeks before its UK release and as a superhero film nut; and having just watched England lose to Portugal, I dragged the MSG to Hollywood’s famous Chinese Theatre to go watch.

Superb stuff. My worry was the Christopher Reeve films legacy (ignoring III which was funny but not great, and the truly abysmal IV with Nuclearman which should just be wiped from our memories) would be trodden on, yet this film lived up to the genre. In my ranking of the series, Superman II is still the best, but this comes in second, ahead of the original film. My only slight concern is this film reveals Superman and Lois being ‘intimate’, quite how Superman does this without injuring her, I simply don’t understand!

Now onto the MSG. There we are watching a scene in the Daily Planet office, and in the background there’s a TV showing a news channel. Then, suddenly, from no where, the MSG appears on it doing the weather! We truly had no clue about this, the MSG herself didn’t know. From later investigation it seems ITN (who used to produce Five News before Sky took over) sell archive footage. Admittedly most people wouldn’t recognise her, as the TV is very small in the shot, but yes, it is the MSG (there are three weather reports shown, she’s doing one of them).

Incredible, there we are, on holiday, in the Chinese Theatre Hollywood, and there’s the MSG on the big screen with Clerk Kent! Way Hey!

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