Dear listener,

Money Box is approaching the end of what will be a record 49 week run - and no I haven't had a week off during that time! This Saturday is the last regular show and next week - the 49th continuous Money Box – will be a special programme devoted to saving and investing. You'll have to wait until next week to find out what happens after that. But don't worry your Saturday noontime won't be left without money and we'll be back soon.

This week the BBC – and much of the rest of the world – has been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first landing of a man on the moon. (Or as my feminist friends said a few years later - what do you call sending a man to the moon? A start.) If you don't remember watching that blurry first step onto the lunar surface live as it happened before dawn on 21 July then you will not remember that at the time we were just beginning the changeover to decimal currency. It replaced our historic coinage of 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound with the ten-base coinage of today.

By 1968 the shilling and two shilling coins were already running in parallel with coins of the same size labelled 5 and 10 New Pence. The two shilling coin, called a florin and worth a tenth of a pound, dated from an earlier attempt to decimalise the currency at the start of the railway age in 1849. One hundred and twenty years later as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon the halfpenny was in its last throes – it ceased to be legal tender 10 days later – and we were anticipating the October launch of the weird equilateral curve heptagon 50 New Pence coin which would soon oust the ten shilling note. D-Day itself – when New Pence landed on the pre-decimal beaches and defeated the half-crowns, threepenny bits and large bronze pennies forever – still lay a couple of years in the future.

Last week I claimed to have invented the word "nowness". I didn't, as a quick internet search will show. Sloppy research on my part. Forty-nine weeks really is taking its toll. But we did have a genuine neologism on Saturday's show. One listener e-mailed me to complain that I had allowed a guest to get away with using "traffic light" as a verb. And he was right. FairBanking boss Anthony Elliott, talking about the idea of putting red, amber, and green colour coding on financial products, said "we can find examples where you could traffic light things, specifically when it comes to managing your money better - certain things like say, the minimum payment on a credit card is an issue that could be traffic lighted." And that does seem to be the first time since the phrase was invented in the early 20th century that it has been used as a verb. Or what you might call verbed. OED please note.

IN THE BEST RADIO PROGRAMME THIS WEEK

Twelve years after the newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair told the 1997 Labour Party Conference that he didn't want children "living in a country where the only way pensioners can get long term care is by selling their home" the government wants us all to join in the Big Care Debate on developing a system that "fits our needs in the 21st century". If decimal currency is any guide by the time it is settled that aspiration may sound rather old fashioned.

We'll be asking the minister in charge whether a compulsory £20,000 tax really will be a vote winner, in England at least (other countries in the UK make their own decisions). And we talk to care specialists about whether any of the ideas could really work better than what we already have.

Those comparison websites for insurance, savings and so on get together to form a trade body to push up standards and look at common complaints.

A Revenue official admits that paying extra into a Child Trust Fund for a disabled child might be a waste of money.

Three days after the government announced that the law which allows firms to force employees to retire at 65 will be reviewed in 2010 and gave broad hints that it would then be scrapped government barristers were in court (on Thursday) putting the case for keeping the law as it is. The change of policy has not stopped the state resisting Help the Aged's challenge to the legality of the present rules.

And 31 July is the deadline for renewing claims to tax credit. If you are one of the six million who get tax credits, don't miss it.

There may be more, there may be less, there may be something different by the time we go on air.

Find out by listening to Money Box on Saturday at noon, Sunday at 9pm, through our website any time or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode at bbc.co.uk/moneybox. There you can also Have Your Say, watch videos, contact us and delve further into the items covered this week. More than 20,000 Money Box pages are viewed every single day.

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