With summer just around the corner, chances are that if you are going abroad you’ve already got your flights/tickets/hotels and everything else sorted out. Passports… check. Pounds changed into euros, zloty, kroner, lira… check. 2-pin plug adaptor… check. Travel Insurance…?

Travel insurance is something that is more and more holidaymakers are considering each year, due to policies being relatively inexpensive, and often easy to obtain, especially in conjunction with European car cover plans.

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Chances are you’re reading this post online, either at your desk at work (on your lunchbreak, hopefully!) or in the comfort of your own home. Practically everybody has the internet these days, as its uses have expanded considerably over the last decade, allowing us to book holidays, transfer bank balances, and purchase practically anything from car insurance, to clothes. If you can stick it in an envelope or parcel and slap a barcode on it, chances are you’ll be able to buy it online.

As such, internet access in UK homes has ascended up the ranks of importance after essential utilities such as water and electricity. In recent years, we’ve seen fast broadband-speed net access become available to more and more punters across the country, with many of them offering customers great savings on combined products and services.

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It’s getting toward the end of the month, it’s a week before pay day and your finances are spread pretty thin, but all the same, a night out or a meal, or a trip to the movies all seem appealing. Time to dip into your overdraft to take out an extra £20? Maybe. Perhaps giving your mates a call first and seeing if you can borrow a bit to tide you over is a more practical solution.

Lending money to and borrowing money from your mates can actually end up saving you a fair bit in the long run, the main reason being is that your friends won’t charge you interest – unless they are incredibly stingy – and if you consider yourself a friend, neither should you! (more…)

A recent survey by Abbey has revealed what a wasteful nation we are when it comes to food - according to the results, more than £218 million worth of food is chucked away by us Brits every week. That amounts to well over £800 million a month. In the past 12 months, we’ve seen the price of food and fuel rise dramatically, with wholesale food prices soaring by a rate more than three times the rate of inflation; we quite literally can’t afford to throw away food at the rate we currently are.

Dave Phelps, 26, who has just moved into a house with his fiancée says that “the things we usually end up throwing away are things like eggs and fresh vegetables where perhaps the use by dates aren’t quite as clearly labelled as they are on other things.”

A report published in the Telegraph earlier this year shows that the price of vegetables in particular is rising; a 500g bag of parsnips that cost £1.76 at Asda at the end of last year were priced just 98p a year earlier, whilst in the space of a year, Tesco increased the price of 2.5kilos of Maris Piper potatoes from £1.78 to £2.18. (more…)

Getting a credit report is an often overlooked but important phase of financial planning, whether you’re about to apply for a mortgage or a comparatively smaller consolidation loan.

The process of attaining reports might seem trivial, especially if you know you can make repayments and remain comfortable, but is worth doing on the off chance that whilst you may consider yourself to be financially secure, there is every chance that a lender will not, and you could end up being refused a loan. Remember that a lender’s ideal customer is one who never defaults, but one who also never repays loans early, so if you think you will be granted a loan because you have always paid well over the minimum monthly amount, think again. (more…)

One upshot of the credit crunch is that savings rates are now at their most attractive, so there’s never been a better time to put your pennies aside – available rates on cash mini Isa’s are currently hovering around 6.25-6.5 per cent, the highest they’ve been in recent years.

Also, due to the rule changes which take effect as of today, there has never been a better time for existing savers to cash in – the maximum you can save in cash in an Isa has increased from £3,000 to £3,600.

Because of this, and of the current economic climate, the already highly competitive ISA market has transformed into a veritable snakes’ nest, with financial institutions on all sides fighting for your investment. Some lenders will pay out interest on amounts as little as £1, with others requiring a more substantial deposit of around £1,000 – some banks requiring higher investments of these types are promising to pay out rates of 10 per cent; anyone fancy getting 10 per cent interest on tax free savings? (more…)