Is it wrong to work at a cinema or be a binman?
Picture the scene. It’s a TV talent show on one of the big channels. A talented young person’s fought through to the finals and is desperate to sing or perform. The producer doing the talking in the head interview finds out the person used to work at a cinema / McDonald’s / a bar… We all know...
Q. If a 4% mortgage goes up by 0.25%, what’s the new rate?
Did you answer 4.25%? If so you’ve have fallen into a trap many newspapers, TV and radio programmes do (and occasionally us here on MSE, too). It’s all about the difference between a percentage increase and a percentage point increase. Recently I was explaining this to some of the more recent MSE team recruits, and thought it...
If you were NCP, how’d you explain its Olympic price doubling?
NCP has increased the price of parking in 38 of its 104 London car parks, and in some case prices are as much as doubling (see the NCP car park Olympics hike MSE News story). While this is aggravating and expensive, it’s a business decision that it has decided to undertake, obviously believing it can get away...
Top 10 UK brands: MoneySavingExpert.com overtakes Apple
It seems the site’s ‘brand buzz’ has jumped in the mid-year rankings. In January I wrote that we’d joined the big boys in the Brand Index buzz rankings (see MSE cracks top 10 brands) – quite an achievement for our team of around 40, compared to the 10,000s of the rest. Well a friend’s just emailed me...
Just called 101 for the first time – great idea
I’ve just made my first call on the relatively new police local 101 number. It’s a great concept. I’ve often grappled in the past over whether things are worth calling 999 about, yet this time I had no qualms. I blogged last year about whether it is right to call 999 over a matress in the road....
It’s time to admit my first BBC appraisal contained the blueprint for MSE
"What does it take to build a website as big as MSE?" It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot recently. So it’s time to reveal that the blueprint was in my very first BBC appraisal. Let me tell you the story… Having left financial PR in the 1990s to take a postgraduate in broadcast journalism at...
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Recent Blogs
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Martin Lewis VIDEO: Should you pay off your Plan 1 student loan?
7 January 2020
If you started university between 1998 and 2012, or since then in Scotland and Northern Ireland, you'll have a Plan 1 student loan. While much is written about whether those with savings should overpay the current English Plan 2 student loans, there's little out there about Plan 1. I wanted to change that, so here's a video explaining how to decide... -
How much the Govt expects you to give your children for university
16 December 2019
Update Note 25 May 2017: The ready reckoners below have been updated with the new 2017/2018 living loan amounts. Also since first writing this blog, and seeing the strength of feeling it attracted, I have written an open letter to the Uni Minister asking him to start telling people about this. Yet sadly received his no we won’t...
