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)....
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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...
