I spent yesterday sitting in Countdown‘s Dictionary Corner with the wonderful lexicographer Susie Dent. As always, I go armed with my lobbying of words that I think should be put in the dictionary – as Susie does a lot of work with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). While much of it is fun banter, Susie is always...

The Government’s new proposals to simplify the 500 current tariffs could actually result in many more new tariffs, though this time not from suppliers.  A cursory initial reading of the announcement seems to indicate it’s heavily biased towards collective switching, where a ‘trusted’ organisation negotiates with an energy supplier to get a bespoke deal. With energy companies...

Later today, Energy Secretary Ed Davey will finally tell us what the PM’s "we’ll force companies to switch you to the cheapest tariff" actually means.   I wanted to write a blog on my thoughts on what it means for the energy maket, based on what seems to have come out so far. Yet truth be told it’s...

And I thought MoneySaving was tiring! I’m on paternity leave at the moment as last Thursday our beautiful first child (MSE Junior) was born. Her name is Sapphire Susan Lewis and while she weighs a wee 6lb 6oz, her weight in joy is immeasurable. Last night was her first one at home and it was quite exhausting...

Plain English and talking complex money concepts are never easy. We try very hard to do this, but recent moves within savings are making it tougher. I’d love your help to see if you can come up with a way to make things clearer. This is all about the use of the phrase "easy access", which is the...

This week the site smashed through its past records for our most visited ever day. As always the record was on a Wednesday, the day people receive the weekly email.  Now, I know many of you are fellow nerds and love these types of stats, so according to our Google Analytics software, here goes… Visits in the...

Again, the nation’s media and politicians are getting in a kerfuffle over the word ‘recession’. Last time, because we went into it. This time, because we’re out of it. Yet the news we’re "out of recession" does not mean the economy is buoyant, or we’re back to where we were in the good times – the only...

Last week we broke our all-time record for the most number of visits in a week. I know stat munchers out there like this type of thing, so here goes… These figures are according to our internal Google Analytics system. Visits/week: 5,640,791 – the number of different trips people made to the site. Unique visitors/week: 3,973,797 –...

Update: 11.12.12: 256 of you responded with your X Factor predictions, but not one person guessed all six correctly (including Martin, though he did do pretty well). Most favoured Ella Henderson to win, with only 16 entrants putting their faith in James to take the title. Of this 16, most correctly guessed four out of the final...