Jamie Afro reclaimed £1,200 of bank charges!

Occasionally in the GMTV green room, when someone I want to meet is on air, I sit on the outside chair, so that when they come from the studio I ‘bump into them’. I was planning to do just this with Jamie Archer, one of this year’s X-factor contestants, and a major favourite of Mrs MSE and...

Just been to the Marmite shop. Can’t decide if I love it or hate it.

Mrs MSE and I were walking down central London’s Lower Regents Street today and walked past the Marmite store. Yes you read it right – a Marmite shop. Now who can resist popping in to see it? Certainly not me, so I thought I’d take some snaps for the blog. Apparently it launched a week ago and...

A poem on banning Christmas presents

My blog earlier this week posited that it’s time to radically rein(deer) back on Christmas gifts (see Is it time to ban Christmas presents?), as it’s become a retail festival. It seems to have struck a cord with many, angered a few and caused one man to compose a poem (see below). Certainly there’s been a rash...

Over 1,000,000 visits in a day

I wrote a story last week about how Wednesday had beaten the site’s record with 906,000 visits in a day. Well, that was smashed again yesterday; for the first time ever the site was clicked onto a million times in a day (according to our google analytics, quite a phenomenal number. For nerds, the exact stats are...

On Parliament TV – Giving evidence at Treasury select committee

I’ve just been sent a link to video of the evidence session at parliament where I was called alongside one of the MD’s at Moneysupermarket to talk about the Credit Application Trap. Now I must admit, having had to check through the transcript the other day (they ask you to do it for accuracy) and realising that...

New Record: 906,000 visits to MoneySavingExpert.com yesterday

Yesterday the site beat its all time record number of visits in day with 906,000, beating the previous record of 878,000. Of course it was on a Wednesday, the day we send out the weekly MoneySaving email, which is always by far the biggest traffic day of the week. I thought stats nerds would like to see...

Shutting down copycat forums – the system works.

The system of policing the internet can actually work. A couple of months ago some forum users sent us a note that they’d spotted a site in the US that had lock-stock and smoking barrel stolen the content of the forum. I don’t just mean similar categories I mean they were grabbing people’s user names and entire...

Chancellor (in lift) says customers can choose which bank they’ll belong to.

Having blogged yesterday about RBS, NatWest new mini banks and my worries about which bank customer’s will belong to when banks are split, I found myself in the lift with Alastair Darling at GMTV this morning. So, much to the consternation of his press officer, I said “excuse me” and put these worries to him. The main...

RBS, Lloyds & Northern Rock create new mini-banks; what’ll it mean for customers?

The government has announced it is planning to spin off sections of the megabanks created during the deep debt rescue needed in the midst of the financial crisis. We hear that Williams & Glynn, a mainly North West-based bank that NatWest took over decades ago will be resurrected by RBS, TSB and others are likely to be...

Just got a box of 48 free Kit Kats

Rather surprisingly a courier just delivered an unsolicited box of 48 four-fingered Kit Kats to the office. It was sent by Frank PR, who does its public relations – it seems my KitKat Crunching Crime blog must’ve come up in their search. The chocolate has been distributed around the team – though I will be sending three...