This piece first appeared in Saga Magazine in December 2011
The text here may not be identical to the published text  

Lolly and the Ivy

Money presents need not be dull

UP TO £10
Lottery

Ever since I lost £10 to a conman on Oxford Street in my teens I have never placed another bet. But many people like a flutter. And a bunch of lottery tickets might give them an interesting couple of months. You can buy a ticket which will be entered up to eight weeks in advance (four weeks for Euromillions). So for less than a tenner you could buy one ticket for every draw for the four weeks after Christmas. One ticket will win £10 roughly every 56 draws. So if you spend £8 on a ticket for each of the next eight draws the chances of winning £10 on at least one ticket are only about one in seven. The first Lotto draw after Christmas is Wednesday 28 December.

UP TO £50
What you see is what you get
Fuel prices this Christmas will be a lot higher than last year. One way to use less electricity is to keep track of what you use. The Which? Best Buy OWL electricity monitor shows how much electricity is used every minute of the day. It could be a great money-saving present. The digital display unit can be carried from room to room for ‘hunt the current’ – turning things on and off and watch it go up and down! It works from a small device clipped round the mains cable by the meter which measures how much power is flowing. Cost: from £35.99 but cheaper through Amazon. Other models will let you store the data on a computer. More at www.theowl.com 01256 383 430.

Be tankful!
Probably the world’s most boring present – but for a car owner the most useful. Why not give £50 worth of petrol? Get your relative to drive you on a mystery tour ending up at a petrol station – making sure they haven’t just filled up! Or give them a card saying ‘when you next need a fill up, I’ll be there’ – a welcome gift for many who need transport but find the cost high. Nowadays £50 will buy less than 40 litres so stretch it if the tank is bone dry! And to find the cheapest price locally sign up to www.petrolprices.com. It’s free and gives the cheapest petrol prices close to any postcode you put in. For 40 litres of petrol even a 3p difference saves £1.20.

Making tracks
Anyone aged 60 or more can buy a £28 RailCard and get a third off every train ticket they buy (£20 for a disabled railcard). If you want to give it as a gift you can buy it online in their name but you will need their passport or driving licence to fill in the form. And if you are feeling more generous it is just £65 to buy one that lasts three years. More at www.senior-railcard.co.uk. And remember anyone in England who is over women’s state pension age (about 60¾ at the moment) or over 60 in Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland can get free local bus travel if they apply for a pass.

UP TO £100
Presents all year
If you want a present for a grandchild then a regular gift of money can be a useful thing. If they have a child trust fund or a Junior ISA why not make a standing order to pay £8 a month into it? That will cost you just under £100 a year but will build up to a nice nest egg by the time they are 18. All interest is tax-free. Remember, you can give away up to £250 to anyone without it counting into any inheritance tax calculations in future.

Premium Bonds
The one form of gambling that I might indulge in is Premium Bonds. You can buy as few as £100 worth and that gives you 100 entries in the monthly draw. Premium bonds pay no interest. Instead the interest of 1.5% that would be paid is entered into a draw. Every month each individual bond has one chance in 24,000 of winning a prize. So with £100 the chances of winning even the smallest prize of £25 in the next year are, frankly, very small. But the capital is safe – and if the recipient gets bored with waiting they can cash the bond in at any time and spend it!

UP TO £500
Gold is a present guaranteed to bring out the goose-bumps. And over the last few years gold prices have risen sharply as investors have looked for a safe haven. But if you buy a small quantity of gold you will pay quite a premium above the official price. That is even more true of coins – they are often not pure gold and beware the word ‘proof’. That means it is nice and shiny but sold at an even higher premium on the value of the gold. Better are the small gold investment bars – make sure they are marked 999.9 which indicates pure 24 carat gold. A ten gram bar will cost you less than £400 but there will be a surcharge on the value of the gold. Ten grams is a bit more than the weight of a £1 coin. More from Baird & Co www.goldline.co.uk and see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/8250772.stm though prices have almost doubled since!

A computer for life not just for Christmas
Perhaps the single most useful item to help people with their finances is computer and a broadband connection as well as a couple of hours’ help to get them going. You can find a decent PC and broadband for a year for under £500. A computer will let your elderly relative manage a bank account and avoid going overdrawn as well as finding and opening the best savings account. They can also save money buying items online and can get shopping delivered to avoid going out – especially in the cold! And they can find the best deals on energy tariffs and other services. And so on. It really will bring returns very week. Not to mention my fortnightly tips at www.saga.co.uk/money!

Snuggle up
One way to keep warm this winter is to put on an extra jumper – but much better is to buy someone a jumper for their home. Basic insulation – which many of us do not have – is cheap and produces lower bills at once. Step 1 is to contact www.energysavingtrust.org.uk 0800 512 012 which knows all about energy saving deals in everyone’s local area. Step 2 is to ask what their own energy supplier will do – they often have special deals for their customers. Step 3 is to offer to pay whatever is needed on top to get the job done. Snuggly!

Up to £1000 or more
If you have serious money to spend then I would recommend opening a good cash savings account for your loved one. Interest rates are low so you need to put at least £1000 in it to get any significant return. If you tie it up for five years you can get 4.6% with Saga’s five year bond, which is currently the best on the market over that period. Investing for income £1000 would give £46 a year paid monthly. And if you can push that up to £1131 it would give £52 a year. Or they could just let it grow and take it out later when they needed it.

 


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