Paul Lewis writes:

Dear listener,

Another disappointing week! Terry Wogan announced his retirement. But I was not invited to replace that stalwart of the Radio 2 breakfast table. Instead the honour has gone to Chris Evans. It must be the marmalade hair. Don’t they still do silver shred?

The DNA tests have not established whether it really was gremlins or some other creature which ate last week’s newsletter. But it certainly disappeared without a trace into the Bermuda triangle that is the BBC computer system. Sorry. But it has been resurrected on my website – look at the archives.

Credit Cards, Debt, Pensions, Savings, Tax. Those were the top five requests when I did some seminars this week helping people with their personal finances. The sessions were called Up Close & Personal. Perhaps because they were about that lifelong intimate relationship with our money!

I promised to show them how to keep more of their own money. And so they would not feel sorry for the banks ¬– who would therefore get less of it – I collated the financial results of the top five (now four) High Street banks. And guess what? Throughout the 2008 crisis, all of them made money out of their UK retail customers. A total of £7.9 billion. And in the first half of 2009 – surely one of the most challenging six months in banking history – they all still managed to make profits from us. A total of £2.1 billion between them. Of course, profits are a good thing – without them (or a hefty subsidy from the Treasury) their businesses wouldn’t exist and jobs would go. But with profits in the ten-figure range, if you can save £5 here or £20 there by paying your credit card on time, or choosing the best savings account, it will make a lot more difference to you than the banks.

Please read this paragraph really fast like at the end of a radio ad:- All figures are taken from the banks’ reported results on their websites or from the press office. Each bank has its own definition of ‘UK retail’ and ‘profit’.  Barclays figures include Barclaycard which has some non-UK business.

NOW FOR THE ITEMS IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION OF THE BEST RADIO PROGRAMME:

It’s not often you get to hold £250,000 in… I was going to say one hand, but in fact it was two. About the size of a house brick but half as thick, the metal bar was 99.99% pure gold and weighed 12kg. It had come from Kazakhstan. But to Tony Baird it was just raw material. On Friday, I visited his company Baird & Co in the east end of London to see how bags of scrap jewellery – and gold bars from Asia – are turned into investment grade ingots, coins, wedding rings, dice, even puzzles. There is a bit of a gold rush on at the moment. Demand is rising from people who no longer trust financial institutions. And those with a bit of gold in the cupboard are seeing the chance of turning it into cash. So is gold a good investment? Or are shares in mines a better idea?

A major High Street bank slashes the cost of going overdrawn from £38 to £5 – probably about what it really costs. As the Supreme Court considers its key judgement in the row about overdraft charges, we ask a lawyer and banking specialist if the latest move means in practice the arguments are over.

Getting £7000 a year for life when you have saved a pension pot of £100,000 always did seem a bad deal. And at last the insurance industry is coming forward with new ideas. And the man who invented one of the alternatives talks to us about an organisation to make financial advisers aware of the new choices available.

The good airline Déjà Vu is touching down on the Money Box landing strip this week. Exactly a year after the collapse of the holiday firm XL, thousands of people are still waiting for compensation. No-one doubts they are due the money. But the travel industry and the banks still cannot agree which of them will pay it. And yes, if you think you’ve heard that before on Money Box, you have. More than once. And it still isn’t settled. We ask why.

Find out the answer by listening to Money Box on Saturday at noon (and repeated Sunday at 9pm). Never miss a show again by subscribing to our podcast. Do that through our website bbc.co.uk/moneybox where you can see pictures of gold, listen again, Have Your Say, read why we are (still) the Best Radio Programme and find out more about all the items covered this week.

Best wishes,

Paul

PS. Don’t forget the programme taster on BBC Breakfast between a quarter to nine and nine o’clock.

e-mail Paul Lewis