THE WEEKEND
Star of the weekend papers was Barclays Chief Executive – soon to be Chairman – Matt Barrett. He honestly told MPs on Thursday that he never borrowed on a credit card – it was too expensive. Though his £1.7 million pay package probably means the need to borrow for consumer spending doesn’t crop up in his house that often. Every Sunday paper had some analysis or comment, but deadlines meant the money supplements on Saturday generally missed the story, leaving it to the business pages which are put together on a Friday. Rising stock markets were the hope of the weekend – was now the time to get back in? And the fear was Government plans – true or speculative – to take more tax off us in new and hideous ways.
Paul Lewis has been a freelance financial journalist for nearly 20 years. He currently presents Money Box on Radio 4, writes for The Daily Telegraph, Saga Magazine, Reader’s Digest and Parenting as well as editing a new and complete edition of the letters of the Victorian writer Wilkie Collins.
SATURDAY PAPERS
FT Money & Business
Pensions jigsaw still lacks many of
its pieces
Don’t expect snappy headlines or breaking news on this front page. Pauline
Skypala’s tour d’horizon of the pensions crisis and the Government’s
plans to deal with it (or not) is typical of what you get. Detailed and
thoughtful, it is probably the best briefing on the topic this weekend. .
Escape route is heavily mined
Despite the tasteless picture of a bomb disposal
expert risking his life poking a knife into the desert, Debbie Harrison’s piece
about transferring out of Group Personal Pension is a useful warning – if only
that in many cases it is not possible to do it “you could be trapped in a
contract that has unacceptably high charges and inflexible terms.” Tough.
But the most useful pieces were in the Money Digest with brief items on the new Stamp Duty Land Tax and on the Land Registration Act which clarifies the law on when squatters can take over unclaimed land. And of course the one case history in the paper is a couple who struggle on £450,000 a year and there were parallel pieces on Russia – Index up 75% this year and An adventure capitalist’s world warning against investing in stockmarkets – in Russia or anywhere else.
The Guardian Jobs & Money
Adding Insult to Injury
This lead story continues the section’s tradition
of breaking real news stories in its money supplement. Jill Papworth and Phillip
Inman produce evidence that some NHS accident departments in Surrey have done
deals with lawyers to encourage car accident victims to sue the other driver for
damages. That enables the hospital to recover its costs from the other driver’s
insurance.
Investors thrown over the precipice
Tony Levene compares the plunging value of these
investments with the rising fortunes of the directors of the firms that sold
them – particularly NDF and David Aaron. It also reports on the anger of Abbey
at the use of its name “inappropriately and inaccurately to describe products”
being sold by David Aaron. Strong stuff.
Visa must close net on these vile
sites
Just when you thought that the attack on credit
cards could not get fiercer, Richard Colbey asks quite reasonably why Visa, the
credit card infrastructure operator, allows fraudsters, spammers, illegal
casinos and even child pornography sites to be Visa merchants and sell their
products online. He calls on Visa to take action to “destroy one of the world’s
most deplored industries.”
The Independent Save&Spend
Credit card rate too high, says bank
chief
The Indie stole a march on its Saturday rivals by
getting this piece on Matt Barrett’s blunder in front of MPs onto its front
page. Let’s hear it for later deadlines!
This shows we need cash classes
was the Indie’s lead as five people fail to answer
three simple questions – based on a Prudential survey. One credit union loans
officer got them all wrong – what is (a) a unit trust (b) APR (c) an annuity.
Surveys seldom make a lead but this one worked for its sponsor as the Pl*n fr*m
the P*u (which I won’t mention) got praise as “written in far plainer language
than the FSA can manage” – faint praise anyway – together with its phone number.
Also in the piece the much more interesting findings of the Consumer Analysis
Group that 37% of bank employees made questionable claims about their products
and slightly more could not define AER – which it helpfully defined for readers.
There’s an art to insuring valuables and Are funds of funds just a layer of charges too many completed a thin section.
Daily Telegraph Your Money
Married until death or the Inland
Revenue do us part
A cunning use of IDS and Betsygate enables editor
Ian Cowie to remind us about the Inland Revenue clampdown on husbands who employ
their wives as a way of cutting tax. Cowie stresses that this was not the effect
of what IDS did and that he denies any wrongdoing. But the IDS connection tempts
you in to a full treatment of a story you may have missed.
Means test trap looms for today’s
working population
Ian also comes up trumps with calculations by
actuaries (helpfully defined as professional mathematicians who advise pension
funds) at Mercer Human Resources that people need a pension pot of £180,000 to
take their income above the level of means-tested benefits.
Revenue to stamp on duty loophole
Alison Steed explains the new rules about stamp
duty from 1 December thoroughly and in detail. A good briefing piece.
As for Pensioners fight council tax cap by, er, Paul Lewis I leave you to judge for yourself.
But always read Jessica Investigates who shows us once again how to handle readers’ horror stories. At least one major finance company always pays up when the magic word ‘Jessica’ is written on a letter.
The Times Money
Sitting pretty or are you
overstretched
Partly an excuse to have an attractive couple on
the front page, this piece rehashes the dangers of big mortgages if interest
rates rise.
Doomed to watch his dwindling life
savings evaporate
Endowment mortgage shortfalls cause misery for one
pensioner. Oh dear.
SUNDAY PAPERS
Mail on Sunday Financial Mail
Labour in £5 raid on pit pensions
Not in the personal finance section – but it should have been. This strong
exclusive news piece by Tom McGhie says it all in its first sentence “The
government is enforcing a nine-year-old deal that allows it to drain billions
from miners’ pension schemes – even though the funds are heading for a deficit
of nearly £1 billion.”
How many more Mr Blair – roll call of
pension wind ups keeps growing
Geoff Prestridge pursues the paper’s tough
campaign on behalf of people whose company pensions have all but vanished when
their employer goes bust. This 3-page feature presents case studies from Samuel
Jones, Birmingham Mint, Moll Industries, and Dexion and lists four other schemes
“you might not have heard about” – Triplex Components, BKL, Kalamazoo,
Gibbs-Palmer. Useful information.
Finding your place in the sun
A typical Mail aspirational piece about 150,000 Brits it claims will have gone
abroad to live and giving the Mail’s own financial planning guide.
Professionally done and part 1 of 4. All it lacks is vouchers to collect.
News of the World
f0%rget it
“The scandal of fat cat credit card companies
ripping off hard-up punters is a national disgrace.” Prendergast’s useful
warnings in a tabloid shell.
Big bosses are as bad as muggers
says Michael Winner. He joins in the Barrett
bating with a warning that businessmen in general are “utterly dishonest and
prepared to fiddle and diddle us”. He claims Barrett’s statement was “inept and
stupid”. Though some personal finance editors thought it was honest and accurate
– just odd coming from the boss of the country’s biggest credit card provider.
Sunday Express Financial - Your Money
Health authorities are cheating ill
and elderly
An important if not new message from editor David
Prosser to older people and their carers - beware when you are told you have to
pay for nursing care. It is often not true as health authorities ignore a series
of legal rulings. But short of going to the Nursing Home Fees Agency, an IFA
which specialises in advice on this topic, the piece was a bit short on detail
of what to do.
David Prosser comes up with the weekend’s best headline for his editorial – Pension Credit Take-up Spin Just Won’t Wash as he reminds readers that really only 100,000 people have successfully claimed this flagship benefit, not the 1.9 million claimed by the Government.
Green Shoots Appear in Market Garden
Is actually about the recent rally in share prices tempting new investors –
which writer Jenne Mannion thinks is a good thing in a piece that has a lot of
advice about how to invest but no warnings about the risks.
Sunday Mirror
The NOTline
Susie Boniface went undercover to work at the pension credit hotline which older
people ring to find out if they can get the new pension credit and claim it.
Boniface claims to have discovered security holes in the employment procedures
and ignorance among the staff “some people who answer the phones can hardly read
write or add up.” A fact she describes as amazing. The Sunday Mirror says
the system is a “shameful shambles” and blames equally the government and
Ventura – the company that runs the call centre. The other side is not given but
this interesting piece will no doubt be one of many as Pension Credit develops.
By contrast the Your Money section has nothing of any interest.
Independent on Sunday Money
Avoid the financial fall-out if
you’ve fallen out of Love
Another survey driven lead – an Indie hallmark this weekend – is a look at the
cost of divorce by editor Melanie Bien. She says a survey shows it can leave the
cost of a wedding looking very reasonable. With some useful if basic advice on
making sure that finances are shared and agreed at all stages. Sadly there was
nothing about the much bigger problems, especially for women, that can arise
when an unmarried relationship ends.
Melanie Bien is the only one to use the Matt Barrett affair (op cit) to call for a cap on high interest rates Time to put a cap on charges and she also uses it to give sound advice on cutting the cost of credit card debt in Play a crafty card game to cut the cost of plastic. Useful stuff.
The funds that went far enough
Simon Hilldrey writes an original piece on
investment funds that put up charges not to enrich their managers – though of
course it does that – but to put off new customers. He claims First State
Investments has is raising its initial charge from 0% to 4% to deter new
investors to its Asia Pacific and Global Emerging Markets funds. The managers
fear that if the funds get any bigger it could “lead to a change in their
investment approach and a downturn in performance”
The Observer Cash
Money no one will even sniff at
Andrew Bibby’s reveals the problems of people with
small pension pots – not on how to live on a few hundred pounds a year but how
to get an insurance company to turn their pot into an income at all. Lillian had
saved £80 a month for three years and her pension fund is worth just £4300. But
she could not find an insurance company that would let her buy an annuity with
it – it was just too small. Most turn up their noses at less than £5000 and one,
Axa, insists on £50,000. So much for the open market option.
If the big players don’t want you,
find the answer on your doorstep
Virginia Morris has potentially valuable advice on
going to a local lender if your mortgage needs are unusual. Generally she says
small local building societies are more flexible and can outperform the
nationals in both savings and lending rates.
Barrett’s blunder did consumers a
favour
Editor Maria Scott takes a fresh line on the
Barclays boss (op cit). “Barrett has done the world a service by owning up about
credit cards. They are a pernicious trap for people who can’t afford to pay cash
for the goods they are buying.” So there.
Sunday Telegraph Money
Brown ponders plans to tax all house
sales
The autumn winds are launching the usual pre-pre-Budget kites at the Sunday
Telegraph. Robert Watts squirts hot air into the notion that when Gordon
Brown returns from paternity leave he will seriously be considering taxing the
capital gain when you sell your home. The piece is thin on evidence – though of
course Gordon has to cover his £17 billion budget deficit somehow. It quotes
Patrick Canon of PricewaterhouseCoopers who says “We know he is eyeing up the
housing market and we know he is looking especially closely at people who make
speculative short-term investments in the housing market.” But the main paper
takes the story on, with the additional byline of Francis Elliot, to claim that
“all house sales” could be taxed and that “confidential discussions” had been
held between Treasury officials and private sector tax consultants. We can only
wait and see.
Equitable offers compensation to
80,000 ‘misled’ investors
Teresa Hunter has another exclusive – she says
that Equitable Life has started to send out letters offering compensation to
80,000 policyholders who bought policies between 1993 and 1998, with the
Financial Ombudsman Service acting as postman where it is already investigating
an investor’s claim.
Stamping down on duty dodgers
Another strong Robert Watts feature on the onerous
new Stamp Duty laws which come into force on 1 December with lots of detail on
what is changing and what is not. He also gives a bit more background on that
taxing house sales story – they do it in Germany where anything sold in less
than ten years is considered ‘speculative’.
Sunday Times Money
Fears for house prices if rates rise
The only paper to make use of Bank of England
Governor Mervyn King’s surprise warning this week that interest rates could only
rise and when they did it would overstretch homebuyers. Kathryn Cooper’s piece
has a lot of guesses by professional speculators (aka economists) at various
banks about where interest rates would be in a year’s time – definitely up – and
what effect it would have – bad.
She twins it with a useful piece Switch your home loan now explaining how to cut your mortgage – if you haven’t done so already of course.
But that in turn is linked to Hidden fees blight ‘cheap’ mortgages where Clare Francis warns that switching your mortgage may not save you quite as much as you are promised.
Don’t give much credit to charity
cards
And Clare’s back later warning that credit cards
that give money to charity for every pound you spend in fact hand over very
little. You would need to spend £40,000 on a Halifax card to donate £100 to your
favourite charity. Some useful and shocking arithmetical details.