The triple lock has always been a hot potato but things have stepped up another gear as it could deliver a bumper 8 per cent state pension increase due to a statistical quirk. The state pension pledge means that payouts rise by the greatest of inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent. Yet, wage growth numbers are being skewed this year because the Covid crash a year ago saw millions put on furlough on a maximum of 80 per cent of earnings, workers suffer temporary pay cuts, and many lose their jobs...
Jul 10, 2021•49 min
Yet more people caught up in the underpaid state pension scandal have been unearthed by This is Money – and tragically, in the two cases we highlight this week, they weren't alive to see justice. Two bereaved daughters received sums of £42,000 and £71,000 because their mothers were underpaid state pension for more than a decade before dying in their 90s. The payouts are all thanks to the intrepid work of investment and pensions editor Tanya Jefferies and our pensions agony uncle Sir Steve Webb. ...
Jul 02, 2021•52 min
How big a pension pot do you need to save for a comfortable retirement? Pension and investing editor, Tanya Jefferies, discusses research that puts a figure on what people need to retire on, in this excerpt from the This is Money podcast. Alongside host Georgie Frost, she talks about Which? research into pension savings and how people can build the pot they need. Also, This is Money's assistant personal finance editor Helen Crane looks at whether you should prioritise getting on the property lad...
Jun 30, 2021•9 min
Home buyers are engaged in a last minute race to beat the stamp duty deadline – with some facing a potential double false economy. House prices have bounced over the past year meaning that the £15,000 maximum saving of a year ago would now come on a property that potentially costs £50,000 more. That has led to claims of a false economy, but it would be doubly so for any buyer who then missed the deadline too and ended up with an extra £12,500 tax bill as they only get the tapered bit of the stam...
Jun 25, 2021•53 min
Sneaker investing – those in the know don’t call them trainers, apparently – has become a big thing in recent years and as values have risen, so has the volume of fakes.It’s not just knock-offs aping standard sneakers anymore, some of the counterfeiters are dabbling in shoes that could go on to be worth thousands of pounds.Can anything be done, does it matter and what’s the attraction if investing in sneakers anyway?This is Money’s Grace Gausden went behind the curtain with eBay, which has its o...
Jun 18, 2021•52 min
Does loyalty pay or is it just a bizarre concept we have allowed businesses to convince us might exist while they take advantage? As banks and building societies hint at better rates for those who have stuck by them and insurers find themselves forced at regulatory gunpoint to at least not sting existing customers, this week’s podcast looks at the loyalty reward and penalty. At what point does the corporate idea of loyalty rewards meet the reality of whether it’s worth sticking with the same pro...
Jun 11, 2021•51 min
Another week, another house price index stating record growth. This time it was the turn of Nationwide, which said prices had risen 10.9 per cent in the year to April, reaching a new high of £242,832 - up by £23,930 compared with 12 months earlier. Most experts say this is down to people's changing lifestyles during the pandemic and the incentive provided by the Government's stamp duty holiday. But are there other forces at play? Fred Harrison, a British author and economic commentator, successf...
Jun 04, 2021•39 min
Another week, another house price index stating record growth. This time it was the turn of Nationwide, which said prices had risen 10.9 per cent in the year to April, reaching a new high of £242,832 - up by £23,930 compared with 12 months earlier. Most experts say this is down to people's changing lifestyles during the pandemic and the incentive provided by the Government's stamp duty holiday. But are there other forces at play? Fred Harrison, a British author and economic commentator, successf...
Jun 04, 2021•39 min
Have Premium Bonds turned you into a savings winner, or are you one of the losers who have been missing out on prizes for years? On this week’s podcast we dive into Britain’s beloved savings lottery, looking at who holds the most Premium Bonds, who wins and who doesn’t. NS&I revealed exclusively to This is Money this week that an astonishing 43 per cent of bonds are held by just 4.3 per cent of savers – that’s £56billion out of the £107billion total. Or to put it another way every £2 out of ...
May 28, 2021•44 min
The UK’s official inflation figure more than doubled to 1.5 per cent in April, it emerged this week, as the stronger than expected recovery continued to push up the cost of living. Meanwhile, as we discussed on last week’s podcast, a wave of demand is meeting a shortage of supply for some items, sparking fears of an inflationary spike. But while this is bad news for the pound in your pocket – which will buy less – and for savers, who will see their measly interest rates fail to keep up with how ...
May 22, 2021•52 min
Holidays abroad are back on… or are they? The much-heralded green list proved to be something of a damp squib, with the only popular British holiday destination on there being Portugal. There was no place for Greece, France, Spain, Italy, the US, or other regular stars in the list of Britons’ favourite travel spots. Some rushed to book trips to Portugal, but travel giant Tui reported this week that holidaymakers are cancelling and delaying bookings and rival On The Beach scrapped all its summer ...
May 15, 2021•48 min
This week saw the launch of new book - Never Go Broke: How To Make Money Out Of Just About Anything, co-written by This is Money personal finance editor Lee Boyce. In this podcast special, Lee is joined from Los Angeles by his co-author, Storage Hunters TV star Jesse McClure, to explain all to Georgie Frost and Simon Lambert. Jesse and lee discuss how they met, how the book was created, and their three step approach to putting more money in your pocket with a little bit of entrepreneurial endeav...
May 07, 2021•55 min
Are you itching to spend or planning to save? Lockdown savers are forecast by the Office of Budget Responsibility to have stashed away £180billion by the middle of this year. That collective cash pile has been built up by those who have been fortunate enough not to see their finances hit by the pandemic, but have seen their outgoings drop substantially. We’ve already seen some big spending themes come out of this, as people splash out on everything from home improvements, to luxury garden furnit...
Apr 30, 2021•48 min
Life is tough for first-time buyers. House prices were already expensive before the coronavirus lockdowns and defying all logic a mini-boom has sent the average house price up £20,000 further over the past year. At the same time mortgage lenders have indulged in a flight to safety, canning the vast majority of 95 per cent loan-to-value mortgages and bumping up the gap between rates on 90 per cent mortgages and those for borrowers with more equity. Once more into the breach has stepped the Govern...
Apr 24, 2021•57 min
Was the blockbuster Coinbase stock market listing a coming of age for bitcoin and cryptocurrency or a top of the bubble moment? The world’s leading crypto exchange platform listed on the US stock market this week and at one point hit a hefty $100billion valuation, before slipping back to $60billion. That’s still a very big number, especially for a business that made $322million last year. But Coinbase is profitable, its earnings are growing rapidly, it can cash in whether bitcoin and crypto pric...
Apr 16, 2021•50 min
On Monday, we take a step towards normality – you can get your hair cut, have a beer outside at the pub and visit a clothes shop. But what about the future of the office? Will we ever go back full-time, or is a hybrid model more likely – and if you're tempted by a shed office, what should you look out for? On this week's podcast, Lee Boyce and Georgie Frost discuss the future of work and the pros and cons of WFH life, including the 'shoffice.' Elsewhere, should you claim home working tax relief ...
Apr 09, 2021•47 min
Financial scams are on the rise. The coronavirus lockdowns have seen a fresh burst of investment cons with fraudsters impersonating legitimate companies to steal tens of thousands of pounds. Unwitting savers are being lured into fake savings and investments, such as fixed term bonds or share schemes, and transferring large sums to fall victim to clone fraud. What’s behind this burst of crime and how can people protect themselves? On this week’s podcast, Georgie Frost and Simon Lambert discuss th...
Apr 05, 2021•50 min
The headlines are telling you the property market is running hot, that the stamp duty holiday extension is stoking the fires, and buyers are ignoring the economic slump to pile in. There’s just one problem: your home is on the market and you aren’t even getting any offers. Perhaps you are in a property coldspot. As property watchers will tell you, the house price index-driven view of a national housing market is something of an illusion. In reality, there are lots of different local property mar...
Mar 27, 2021•51 min
What’s the point in an Isa? This is a regular grumble as savings rates are now so low that earning 1 per cent would be a big deal. But wouldn’t you rather have all of a small amount instead of a small amount minus tax? And if you are investing, an Isa makes a lot of sense – embracing your gains and dividends in a nice tax-free wrapper. On this week’s podcast, Georgie Frost, Lee Boyce and Simon Lambert talk Isas: from the classics, cash and stocks and shares, to the upstarts the lifetime and juni...
Mar 19, 2021•48 min
Is the economy primed to bounce back? That might sound like a strange question when you’ve just had the news that UK GDP fell by 2.9 per cent in one month, but January’s lockdown slump was nowhere near as deep as expected. It seems that despite a tough lockdown being imposed, shops and big chunks of the economy being shut and schools being closed, the UK has adapted to restrictions better than thought when it comes to doing business. On this week’s podcast, Georgie Frost, Jayna Rana and Simon La...
Mar 12, 2021•50 min
The Budget this week was notable for two things: Firstly, The Chancellor decided to delay settling the coronavirus bill to another day and, secondly, the true scale of the women's underpaid state pension scandal was laid bare at £3billion. The collossal short-changing of married women on their state pensions was uncovered by This is Money columnist Steve Webb and journalist Tanya Jefferies just over a year ago. Their investigations, campaigning and tenacity has paid off and now women affected sh...
Mar 06, 2021•55 min
Rumours are swirling ahead of the Budget that Rishi Sunak will extend the stamp duty holiday by three months? The idea is that this would help stop the collapse of chain after chain as buyers pull out, renegotiate or have to find more money if they miss the deadline. The excuse being given is that conveyancing delays are holding up sales. But wouldn't a three-month delay just kick the can down the road by another 12 weeks and lead to another cohort of buyers potentially affected? Would it be bet...
Feb 28, 2021•50 min
Since the stamp duty holiday came in last summer, there has been a property market mini-boom despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Is it losing puff yet and if not, when is it going to run out of steam and will we see the tax holiday extended? The typical home added £20,000 of value in 2020 according to the Office for National Statistics, while prices of detached homes are growing far quicker than other housing stock. On this week’s podcast, Simon Lambert, Lee Boyce and Georgie Frost take a ...
Feb 19, 2021•1 hr
The double dip recession is off. The GDP figures are in for the final three months of 2020 and the UK economy grew by 1%, according to the ONS, despite widespread expectations that it would shrink again. This means that even if the latest – and hopefully last – lockdown shrinks the economy in the first quarter of 2021 then we will avoid the dreaded double-dip – as you need two consecutive quarters of negative growth (forgive the economics speak) for a recession. Of course, we don’t know when thi...
Feb 12, 2021•52 min
Mistakes. We all make them, but whether we will admit them freely often depends on what they are and how we made them. Investing mistakes can be among those that are tough to swallow and own up to. Often the easiest thing is to brush them under the carpet and try not to think about it too much. But looking at where we went wrong and learning from it is an important part of long-term investing. On this week’s podcast Georgie Frost, Lee Boyce and Simon Lambert discuss investing blunders. Simon con...
Feb 05, 2021•1 hr
‘It’ll end in tears.’ How many times did you hear your parents sound that warning - and how often did you actually pay attention? The army of traders playing with fire in the GameStop stock market frenzy this week have had their warning from a plenty of those who supposedly know best. But it’s fun, they feel a common sense of purpose, they’re giving the big boys a bloody nose, and for now they’re winning. And so the game continues? But should it have been allowed to get this far? Should the trad...
Jan 29, 2021•44 min
In case you hadn’t noticed, bitcoin went on bit of a tear recently. And as the price of the leading cryptocurrency soared again, so did the number of stories written about it. Bitcoin is an interesting tale, a welcome diversion in a Covid-bound world, and the circus around cryptocurrency is the gift that keeps on giving for journalists. But the vast majority of those column inches focus on two things: bitcoin’s price and should you invest? A question that’s not so much asked is what should you d...
Jan 22, 2021•45 min
More than five years since pension freedom arrived a solution to take the pain out of investing in retirement is being lined up. Before pension freedom many savers were locked into buying an annuity with their personal pensions or defined contribution work schemes – and a lot of them felt they were getting a raw deal. That’s meant that keeping a pension invested and drawing on it as you choose in retirement has proved a very popular option. It is also a very tricky one to navigate – but now some...
Jan 17, 2021•47 min
Happy new year, happy new lockdown. 2021 has seen off 2020, but schools and large chunks of the economy have shut down again and people have been ordered to stay at home, as across the UK the nations adopt their own version of lockdown. It’s probably been the gloomiest start to a year for as long as many can remember and a tough winter for people, businesses and the economy lies ahead. So what happened? The UK stock market jumped, of course. Contrary as this may seem, there is some logic to inve...
Jan 08, 2021•55 min
Making predictions can be a mug’s game and never has that proved more true than for any made at the start of 2020. It’s been an astonishing year, when the lives and freedoms we took for granted were dramatically disrupted – and one where ordering people to stay at home triggered the biggest economic crash in the UK since the Great Frost of 1709. While looking forward to what might happen in 2020 will have proved fruitless, looking back certainly provides a few things to talk about. On this week’...
Dec 24, 2020•59 min
