Don’t Use the Cash Machines at Wetherby Services
To a coeliac, motorway services are distinctly unfriendly places with lots of overpriced poisonous-to-them food.
There is a couple of exceptions and those are the ones with say a Waitrose or an M&S Simply Food, where you can buy a salad, that you know you can trust.
We stopped at Wetherby Services on the A1 and I bought a tuna and bean salad from the M&S there, together with some bananas and some lemonade.
I also needed some cash, but as all the cash machines would be charging me to withdraw some of my own money, I declined. I mentioned this to the lady in M&S and she said she never used them for that reason.
In the end, I got my money out at Tesco in Redcar, where they don’t charge. But it did mean taking an obstacle course through their litter-strewn car park, with cars all going against the direction signs!
If Network Rail can put up signs in Liverpool Street station, that all cash machines in the station don’t charge, then isn’t it about time, that Service Areas stopped ripping off motorists!
A Warning About On-Line Loan Brokers
The BBC is today warning about on-line loan brokers, who take up-front fees and then don’t give you a loan. Apparently, there has been a large rise in complaints to the Office of Fair Trading.
Bank Margins
The margins banks are charging on lending are being criticised. And rightly so!
It’s actually all our fault. We borrow too much to on things like credit cards and always go the conservative route about how we borrow and invest. We also don’t shop around with our banking and change when we should!
So don’t complain about the banks, look for sensible alternatives.
As I’ve said before, I lend money through Zopa. I also know of people, who’ve used the company for a loan. I’ve not heard any complaints yet. So it does appear there are alternatives out there! But be prudent! It’s just a pity that Prudence wasn’t, or we’d all be in a better state.
Yorkshire Loan Company
I’m not sure how these loan scams work, but I suspect they ask you for lots of up front fees and then charge you an exhorbitant interest rate. So there’s nothing unusual there.
24 Charlton Drive,
London, Glos GL53 8ES, UK.
Registration Number- PZ5407728.
License Number- 442874
Phone No:+447045705331
Fax: +448702885031Looking for a loan, borrow between £20,000 to £20,000,000.00.There’s no decision with a Decision Loan – considering we are able to help people. Our interest rates are some of the lowest in the business. Our friendly staff will handle your loan application without you having any problem.
It’s never been easier to apply to Easy Loans and arrange a loan to extend your house, buy a holiday home, get a new car or simply pay off all your existing debts. Remember, if you have previously been declined for a loan contact us today with the below information:
Full Names:
Country Of Resident:
Valid Cell Phone Number:
Age:Greetings,
Yorkshire Management
A few points :-
- Look for a start at the address, which says that London is in Gloucestershire.
- And then the phone number is one of those high cost 0704 numbers, which you should never phone.
- Licence is spelt the American way with an s.
- The consumer credit licence number may be valid and could relate to an outfit called 1-Click credit.com. Their site has the same Gloucestershire address, but no phone number or an e-mail address. I wouldn’t use them either for that reason.
So ignore ithis scam.
Alliance and Leicester Building Society
This building society has now been rebranded as part of the Santander Group.
But the spammers seem to be unaware of this change and they still keep sending me masses of e-mails trying to get me to give away my login details. It’s pointless anyway as I’ve never had an account at the bank or its parent.
On the subject of phishing spam, I’ve been watching it for about ten years now and it’s hardly changed in the wording and layout. So of the billions the crooks send out any day, how many actually reach a sucker, who is prepared to open their web site. On one today, I tried to open the link and the crooks web site had been taken down.
Hopefully, there must come a day, when the crooks give up and go away? But we don’t seem to be trhere yet! I don’t seem to have read of any prosecutions of phishers either. Surely, the banks are hoping for more than that the crooks give up?
On the other hand, today the Americans have swapped the Russian spies, when they should have prosecuted them! So is it now the policy of governments to only arrest those that have committed minor crimes?
Why I Chose My Bank
I did this because it is in a convenient place in the High Street and I’d heard from people I trust, that the on-line banking worked well.
I also chose it because, I didn’t get too much spam purporting to be from the bank trying to get me to login to a fake site. This cut the chances of getting fooled.
Except fot two e-mails in the last week, which I knew to be very fake, as they were so obvious and lacked security check information, this is still the case.
But there are banks out there, for which I still get masses of phishing spam. I immediately delete them, as I have no account at the bank, so they must be crooked, especially as they go to undisclosed-recipients, which is a sure sign of fraud.
So are these banks ignoring these messages, which are an affront to their good name and a threat to their and their customers security?
An Advantage for the Zopa Borrower
I recently had an e-mail from Zopa, asking if I’d mind if one of my borrowers could change their repayment day, as they had changed jobs and now got their salary on a different day of the month.
How civilised? And of course I had no reason at all to object.
I wonder how Big Bank plc would have responded to the same request! They would probably have charged you for the privilege!
It all illustrates how banking will change in the next few years, driven by innovators like Zopa.
Zopa Rates Around the Election
Let’s assume that this election without a full outcome has put a lot of instability into the money markets. According to all the commentators it should. But then those traders in the City are in business to make money in the short-term and not place money for the greater good in the long-term.
So is there a real measure of what real people think about finance?
I lend money on Zopa, which is a peer-to-peer lending site. I’m not interested in short-term gains, but sensible and safe long-term growth. I get about 5.5% before tax taking everything into account. It’s also fun and a bit like gambling without the risk.
So how has Zopa performed over the last few weeks? And specifically what have their rates done?
Zopa Rates 2010 – 11th May 2010
If you look at the rates, the pattern appears to be very similar to the last few months. There has been a slight upward trend of rates, with a squiggle around the turn of the month. The latter is because most Zopa loans pay around the beginning of the month and this affects the rate as most investors reinvest their returned payments.
So does this mean that most Zopa users have just been carrying on as normal and letting the lunatics in Westminster and the City get on with their high-profile nonsense?
I shall report on this in about seven days time, as I think it will still be nice and stable despite the politics.
Zopa and the Election
I am an inveterate analyser of data. After all it’s what I’ve done since I was about seventeen and I successfully explained the shape of the response I got when a small ferrous inclusion in a copper wire passed through an electromagnetic coil.
That was forty-five years ago.
So can all the data I’ve got from Zopa be used to explain how people feel about the election and show how Zopa is affected by what is going to happen on May 6th?
Here’s a graph of my returns since the start of the year.
Zopa Returns - 2010
The four lines on this graph are.
- The rate at which money is lent out in the A* Rate.
- The return on money in Zopa over the last six months. This takes account of any bad debts.
- The return on money over the last year. Bad debts as before.
- The return on money over the last year, adjusted for arrears. Bad debts are accounted for and if arrears are greater than a year ago, they are counted as bad debts.
Taking the last three it would appear that things have changed since the election was announced, as they have all dropped and then recovered slightly. This is solely due to an additional bad debt, caused by the death of the borrower. No system can take care of that very sad event.
Probably the best measure of the return is to look at it in the middle of the month. Today is the 13th, so the return on money over the last year is 5.42%, 5.35%, 5.38% and 5.18% for the last four months. So it has dropped 0.2% because of that bad debt. If that is eliminated then the return for April 13th would actually be 5.37%.
So the election has done what you’d expect and had no affect, as most deals were done whilst the date of the election was not known.
But look at the A* borrowing rate.
If you look at the graph, you’ll see that the rate often drops around the 5th to the 10th of each month. This is probably because most loans are paid around the turn of the month and the effect of that money being reinvested is to drop the loan rate slightly because of the supply of money being increased.
But this month it has dropped further than normal after creeping up slightly for the last month or so. Perhaps the rate has increased because of high demand for money.
Could this be that as reported retail sales have been high this month and people are borrowing at a rate they trust to finance it? Or are they worried about the new government increasing VAT?
But really there is no hard and fast evidence that Zopa is being seriously affected by the election.
I shall return to this as the elction approaches.
The Banks Hidden Charges With Zopa
Not on Zopa!
Everything they do is detailed on your statement.
But take this week.
I wanted to put £500 into Zopa on Monday, so I did the transfer then. Only three days later has it turned up in my Zopa account. It used to be done straight from my debit card, but then one of the banks said that doing it that way, they didn’t get their pound of flesh.
So effectively they have my money for three days. At my rate of return on Zopa, that’s about forty-five pence.
Why?
I suppose they have to make their bonuses some way. My old mate, David, once told me that in the 1980s banks made a third of their profits on this sort of overnight money.
Has anything changed?
The Anonymous Widower 