Dear listener,

Money Box is still on Saturdays and will remain so. But Money Box Live – our phone in – is being uprooted from Mondays and replanted on Wednesdays from this coming week. The time of 3pm remains the same. So remember to do something else on Monday and rearrange your schedule so that you can tune in for Money Box Live on Wednesday 7th at the same time, 3pm. And every week thereafter it will have bedded down on Wednesdays at 3pm. Money Box, as I say, is and will remain on Saturday as ever.

I celebrated New Year’s Day by going to see Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company. And here is the wonderful Polonius giving advice to his son Laertes who is about to go on his travels.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

And of course we have all done both to excess for so long – dulling the edge of husbandry by borrowing more than we can afford, to buy everything from a house to a new jumper. And lending money to the bank to save or invest which is now worth less than when we lent it, losing both itself and our friendship with the banks.

And if only the banks had listened to this advice

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Enough Shakespeare. Just pausing to remind you of Hamlet’s take on business in 2009.

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!

*** ON MONEY BOX THIS SATURDAY ***

If ever a year showed that the value of shares can go down as well as plummet it was 2008. And it was a plunge straight into a cold bath as shares in our biggest hundred companies fell in price by nearly a third. The 31.7% fall was the biggest in any year since the FTSE 100 index began in 1984. What does this mean for our pensions and investments? Is there anything we can do except say "aaarrrggghhhh"?

The pound has had a bad year too. And with holidays in Europe and America now much more expensive due to its decline, where can we go? We name the top countries to visit whose money had an even worse year than the pound. And warn you off the places with the strong currencies that have biffed the pound into the long grass.

Could 2009 be the year when building societies take on the banks? I talk to the boss of one of the smallest, who knows many of his customers by name, about old-fashioned banking – taking in savings and lending them out to people who want to buy a home. And that’s it. Then I cross the Pennines to speak to the boss of one of the bigger - and growing – societies, who also does, guess what, old-fashioned banking. Is this the future? And can it meet our aspirations?

Ignore headlines in the papers today that say "married couples are punished by the tax system". They’re not. Of course, a couple with more than one child who live together and claim tax credits get less money than if they lived apart with a child each. But whether they are married or not is irrelevant. We’re probably not doing that story but I just thought I’d mention it in passing. We will mention the fact that everyone with children will gain from the new rates for child benefit - £20 for the first child (up 6.3%) and £13.20 for each other child (up 5.1%) - which start on Monday. The April rise has been brought forward by three months.

All that – possibly more, possibly less – in Money Box on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday at noon, repeated Sunday at nine. You can listen to all the items on all our programmes through our website. And watch a short interview I did on the 100th anniversary of the state pension. Money Box is available as a podcast you can download or subscribe to. And if you want to read what was said we publish a transcript every week by late Monday or early Tuesday. Which is good value considering that there is no licence fee for the radio.

Happy New Year.

Best wishes,

Paul

PS Don’t forget the programme taster on BBC Breakfast between quarter to nine and nine o’clock. If you miss it, you can watch it on our website.

e-mail Paul Lewis