
I sent my first email 20 years ago, to a girl, obviously – you?
I’ve just realised it’s now two decades since I first got online and sent an email. I believe it was May 1995. I’d just excitedly returned from a remarkable experience at the United Nations Youth Conference in Seoul, where I’d been as the President of the LSE Students’ Union. Out there I met the president of the...

Why you should ignore the “You can throw away bank statements after six years” rule
The conventional wisdom is you only need to keep bank, credit card and other personal finance documents for six years. This is because HMRC (the taxman) can only ask you to go back that far if you’re being investigated for tax purposes. However, I think the landscape has changed in recent years, and therefore everyone needs to...

Buy Zara clothes at a fraction of the cost, and get a flight thrown in
Update 17 July 2017: We tend to think since Brexit that the pound’s weaker than it has been for decades. While somewhat true against the dollar, against the euro it’s only a tad worse now than when I first wrote this in 2014. The logic of this blog stands just as strongly now. On the Spanish-English website...

Turning the MSE forum into a true social network…
The launch of the Citizens Advice Bureau board in the MSE forum is a more radical change than it may appear. Our forum has more active UK users than Twitter (source: YouGov), yet when social networks are discussed, it’s overlooked. After Facebook, the dominant UK social media platform are forums – MSE, Mumsnet, The Student Room, Digital...

Backed up your mobile/PC data? It’s useless unless…
Backed up your mobile/PC data? It’s useless unless… After the worst computer problems in banking history, causing a punitive shockwave for customers of NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank and Think Banking, it’s worth considering your own personal data backup. Running a big website, I’ve a constant paranoia about catastrophic failure and losing both the backup of the site...

Sneaky preview of the new MSE masthead – what do you think of m’pic?
The green masthead’s on its last legs, we’re in the process of a gradual redesign and a big element of this is the new masthead. It’s prime real estate on the site as it’s on every single page, so before we go for it, I’d love your views… Click here to see a clearer full size version...

Oops… MSE does an unwitting DDOS…
The guide to buying repossessed property was a surprise hit in this week’s email. As always when we launch a new guide we’ve little idea of how popular it’ll be – and neither have the sites we include in it. Most can’t quite believe the sheer weight of traffic that comes from something popular in the weekly...

The first new MoneySavingExpert.com website in 6 years
This week was a momentous one for the site, due to a subtle change. It marks a new stage in its development and it all revolves around the Travel Money Maximiser. While it’s been on the site for eighteen months, we’ve just supercharged it with more providers and facilities, like a buy back comparison. Yet more revolutionary...

The new MSE weather prediction service
Having just been away in the sun for a few days, I’ve discovered MoneySavingExpert.com has a bespoke new service for nerds, which even I hadn’t been told about. Quite remarkably, the site can now predict British Weather. I first noticed the phenomena a couple of weeks ago, when between 1,200 and 1,700 people joined the email over...

The Forum Top 50! What’s best read?
I’ve just grabbed the stats below from the system, to see which the most popular forum boards are. This is done on page views not people, so perhaps a better explanation would be the boards people view again and again and again and keep updating. No surprise that Grabbit is top, so I’ve used it as a base...
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Recent Blogs
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Martin Lewis VIDEO: Should you pay off your Plan 1 student loan?
11 January 2021If 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...