The new personal savings allowance means some will be better off earning LESS interest
Until now for every £100 of interest a basic-rate taxpayer earns outside an ISA, the taxman takes £20. Yet on 6 April, the savings landscape changes. The new personal savings allowance (PSA) means ALL basic-rate taxpayers will be able to earn £1,000 a year interest on all savings, higher rate £500, tax-free. But within the way this works...
Council tax, 20 years since it was valued: a flawed system no one’s brave enough to sort out
Take a look at the back of your council tax letter, you’ll see that what band you’re in depends on the property’s value on 1 April 1991, twenty years ago today. This valuation was done in ‘second gear’ by estate agents and others driving past. It was a stop-gap measure, but in England and Scotland it’s...
Parking Fines. You can reclaim them…
Last December I was hit by a stonking great parking fine. It was £60 for parking opposite a sign that effectively said “no parking until 6.30pm” – outrageously my fine was for parking there at 6.35pm. I blogged back then that this would be the first of my reclaim campaigns I would actually be using myself (see...
My first reclaim: Unfair Parking Ticket.
Update Note: To find out what happened see the Parking Fines: You can reclaim them… blog. After all these years of reclaiming campaigns like bank charges & PPI I have never actually needed to do a reclaim myself. Until now. I received an outrageous parking ticket the other day for £120 (£60 if paid within 14 days)....
Recent Blogs
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Martin Lewis: Payment holidays coming to an end – but should you take one? Mortgages, credit cards, loans, payday loans, car finance and more
20 October 2020
Within the last week, we've seen the extension of coronavirus credit card, personal loan and overdraft help to 31 October 2020, with mortgage payment holidays already extended. The regulator's other help schemes are also likely to be extended too, including car finance and payday loans, yet should you do it? -
Is it time to ban Christmas presents?
14 September 2020
Update September 2017: It’s eight years since I first braved this subject, expecting a snowstorm of protest. Instead, year after year more join in, like Julia who recently tweeted me, “@MartinSLewis, finally took your advice and told my family I can’t afford Christmas presents. What a weight off my mind. Thank you.” One year even the Archbishop of... -
Martin Lewis: I confess, I did a 'decoy effect' experiment on my Twitter and Facebook followers… and it may be why they're buying more Jaffa Cakes
7 September 2020
Behavioural economics is a powerful science. Some retailers are undoubtedly using it to make us pay more to get less. One element is the 'decoy effect' – where a higher-priced item is sold, to make items next to it look like bargains. So I wanted to do a little experiment to test it
