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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...