finance
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If you look around the internet and conversations you may have had about your mortgage going up in recent years, one theme has been common – Liz Truss drove the mortgage rates up. The counter to this has been that inflation has been high, base rates have had to counter this, mortgage rates were already… Read more
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Chatting to a friend over the weekend she said she had shares in BT. I asked how much she was making in dividends; 74 pence she said. She’d inherited her BT shares from her mother who had them as a former British Telecom employee. That was a funny conversation. Making just 74p isn’t going to… Read more
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Only last night I was catching up with a friend, asking him if he’d had any more recent income from his Premium Bonds – After last summer he said he was getting more regular “wins” of £100 a month from his full investment in Premium Bonds. He said he never used to have so many… Read more
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Just over a year ago I started dabbling in shares via the Freetrade app. My trading philosophy is to buy shares in services that I use and claw back some of what I spend almost as discounts or cash back. My supermarket of choice, until the cost of living crisis, has always been Sainsbury’s. It… Read more
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Only the other day I said that we should all be shareholders. I say that partly because successive governments after Margaret Thatcher’s initial privatisation have promised that everyone can be a shareholder. The reality is that they are not. Depending on which figures you look at, only between 22% and 33% of Brits are direct… Read more
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Do you remember when so many UK service were run by the state? I remember the gradual drip-drip sale of services, starting from the time of Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979. It grew in the 1980s under “Thatcherism” and continued with her successor John Major, even when Tony Blair was PM from 1997 to 2007.… Read more
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Whilst the prime minister is embroiled in yet another controversy, his government has set out to throw “red meat” out to its voter base and back benchers. For one thing, saying the military should be in charge of handling migrant boats in the English Channel is just ridiculous. There are not enough Royal Navy vessels… Read more
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“StartUp Loans: Why Raising the Age Limit is So Desperately Needed” first appeared in the is4profit small business blog The first small business news story of the day today is that Lord Young, David Cameron’s Enterprise Adviser, wants to raise the age limit on StartUp Loans. This is a great idea and I’ll explain why… Read more
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“You Can Bank on Dave” first appeared on the is4profit small business blog. So what happened in “Bank of Dave”, episode 2 last night? Burnley Savings and Loans has been lending a LOT of money. The problem is that they still don’t have their savings licence and cannot take deposits. But, on the bright side,… Read more
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“The Bank of Dave” first appeared on the is4profit small business blog. A man in a pin-striped suit, asking for your money. Oh, no, not another banker…! Wrong. It’s Dave Fishwick, who made his millions as an entrepreneur with his own small business, and now he wants to hand some of that cash back to… Read more