Been filming for Tonight with Trev today for next Friday’s programme on payment protection insurance. As part of it Tonight asked me to do an open ‘Loanbuster’ clinic, based at the Plaza shopping centre in London. Yet as it was meant to be me meeting people who wanted help, it was a bit of surprise that there we were setting up, when the first person to arrive was James Alexander, the Chief Executive of Zopa. Zopa is a company which matches people who want to lend money with people who want to borrow it, and it can be very cheap in certain circumstances; see cheapest loans article.
It seems he’d read the note on the website announcing it and his office is nearby so he thought he’d come along. On the programme we say he got one of the leaflets about it (they were being handed out around the plaza), as due to Ofcom rules, when I’m presenting I can’t mention the site.
Now of course I couldn’t help asking him, “how can I help you with your loan and insurance?”. Unsurprisingly he wasn’t there to get some info, but because he wanted to add his voice to worry about the sales of loan insurance (see cut loan insurance costs article) and ask if I was planning to launch a campaign similar to bank charges on it (see bank charges: reclaim up to six years worth article). In fact I think this is more an important ‘saving money’ piece than a campaign; many people have PPI without realising it, or at least without realising how much they’re paying for it – and the aim is to ensure they understand exactly what they’re doing.
Then it was time to get on with meeting some real people, until a journalist from Mortgage Strategy magazine (a mortgage industry trade publication) turned up, again unannounced to ask me some questions about my views on PPI. Thankfully we got through the people who wanted to talked, saved some money and then carried on an arduous days filming; lots of pieces in a short space of time.
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