The following is a guest post from money saving tips website Personal Finance 4 All. Due to the current economic climate in the UK, borrowing money has become extremely difficult. In such a volatile financial market lenders check how reliable and trustworthy you are by looking at your financial history. When you apply for any [...]

A little financial planning and budgeting can make all the difference on your marriage.

Christmas is approaching and it won’t be long before we’re opening up Christmas presents from friends and family, and of course those delivered by Santa. Santa has been running the Christmas game for quite a while – which is starting to take it’s toll according to a recent family guy episode. Children – and adults [...]

Just because homeless people are, well, homeless doesn’t mean that we can’t learn valuable financial lessons from them. Take the story of a homeless man named Travis Lloyd Kevie. In 2010, Kevie was homeless and living in Penryn, California. One day, Kevie got a bright, if not legal, idea. At a local convenience store, he [...]

Use Facebook, Twitter or some other social media site (remember MySpace?) and your insurance premiums might go up. That’s right. It’s funny news season. It turns out that insurers are really thinking of cranking up the premiums for households that make use of social networking. The concern is that too many people announce to the [...]

GoCompare is due to make some changes to their advertising as a counter move to the success the meerkat campaign has had for Compare the Market. The new ad will feature an opera singer called Gio Compario. The website gio-compario.com has been registered by GoCompare but, at the time of writing, isn’t currently in use. [...]

Huzzah huzzah for artist Roger Griffith. Roger isn’t a poor man. He has a gallery in New York City. He has NZ $190,000 in Westpac Bank who he had been with for 25 years. When Roger came to ask for mortgage for a $385,000 property in Mapua the bank refused. On top of his NZ [...]

Google Checkout is a similar proposition to PayPal. You can use it to act as a middle man between your bank and the site you’re shopping at. Whereas many people use this as a handy way to pay without having to fish for their credit or debit cards there is also the handy security benefit [...]

Zoopla has bought Thinkproperty.com from the Guardian Media Group. In a sign of the teams you could read about this consolidation in the UK property portal market in the Zoopla blog.

Zoopla don’t just get a great brand. They’ve managed to secure themselves as the exclusive search partner for the Guardian.co.uk.

We agree with the wise words of Property Owl who hoot that there are still too many portals and that Zoopla now face the challenge of the integration. In particular Property Owl’s suggestion that an industry wide standard on property feeds would is an interesting idea and worth looking at.

Interesting news stalwart Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is to be thanked for bringing this to our attention. Visa have recorded a $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 charge on a prepaid card.

The Consumerist, who broke the story, point out that’s 2,000 times larger than America’s national debt of $11 trillion and that the ever-vigilant billing team at Visa remembered to add the $20 charge for being in the red. Yes; the card was also suspended.

Prepaid cards are an interesting idea. They work in a very similar way to credit or debit cards except you can only spend the balance that has been assigned to the card. In theory this means it is impossible to run in to debt (as there’s no overdraft option) and therefore ideal for giving to teenagers.