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...

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...

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...

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… 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...