It’s time to give away one of my on air TV maths secrets.  It enables me to look like I’m doing whizz hot calculations in my head eg. when someone says “my debts are at 12%” I can instantly say “at that rate what you’ll owe will double just over every six years”… The trick… If you...

Trying to clearly communicate finance is tough enough, but sometimes rules intended to make things clearer do exactly the opposite.  I’ve ranted before about the problems with meaningless APR rates on credit cards. Now I want to focus on the AER rate on savings… What is the AER? It stands for the Annual EquivalentRate, and it is...

I just stumbled across a video of myself when I was doing freelance business reporting for the BBC back in 2001-2.  It was a strange time as I was just starting off as “Money Saving Expert”. But because there wasn’t a huge demand for that sort of journalism back then, I just filled in for general business...

It’s been a while since I last wrote the words “biggest day ever” but on Wednesday the site smashed its all time record for the most visits in a day with 1.15million  (and every other user metric too) and making it onto the WORLD’S biggest 1,000 sites list (well for the day)… The records are always on...

I received a letter from American Express yesterday promoting its “Express Cash Facility”; effectively trying to pump me to withdraw cash from an ATM on a credit card.  That’s bad enough in itself, but nowhere on the letter did it tell me it’d charge 27.9% interest for the privilege… For years we’ve had more and more responsible...

I’ve just found out I’ve got a daughter and her name is Hannah, this has come as something of a shock… Now before you think this is about to get really salacious and are wondering who the mother is, it’s actually my wife Mrs. MSE. Confused? That’s not surprising, so let’s go through it – some of...

It’s rare that my jaw drops when receiving a question, but this one on the back of my News of the World column did just that. It wasn’t the question itself, but the moment I knocked the numbers into my calculator and realized the true impact… I wrote the Q&A below for my page in the paper,...

Filming yesterday for BBC1 Watchdog (that’ll be aired tonight) felt like Murphy’s law personified (Sod’s law being “if anything can go wrong it will”, Murphy’s law being “Sod was an optimist”)… No airport would let us film The piece is about travel money – the aim being to find people setting off on holiday and show them...

Walking back through the gates of Downing Street on Friday, the first time under the new administration, I was struck by how everything feels and looks the same… While of course the physicality hasn’t changed much, the place is so embodied by the spirit of the Govt that the hue seems slightly irrelevant. And I’m pleased to...

Is this the biggest ever saving on Amazon, why a camera connection cable should’ve been priced at more than the cost of a luxury yacht I’m not quite sure, but it almost makes you want to snap it up. Take a look at the screen grab Thanks to MoneySaver Richard B who sent this in. He did...