Compulsory personal finance education in schools was days away last year, then in the pre-election “wash-up” it got scuppered as a by-product of the parties’ disagreement on sex-ed. Now it’s time to re-kick-start it and, with the News of the World’s help, I hope we did a bit of that yesterday. This campaign needs to [...]
Filming for Watchdog yesterday, we discussed using this word in what we were doing, but I was resolutely against it as I thought most people didn’t know what it meant. So to prove it we did a couple of experiments, the result being not only did people not know, but they actually thought it was [...]
It may’ve shifted far from its roots as a social experiment, but Big Brother still holds a certain fascination. Nothing for me is more visceral than the shopping task, where a group of adults need to co-operate on a difficult purchasing decision, and even with mega-brains Andrew and Mario they don’t always get it right. [...]
There are some phrases you couldn’t make up if you tried, and this one from MSE Jenny is pure genius. Let me set the scene… MSE Jenny is the site’s senior writer; she’s a great journalist and has been working on the new top gold selling sites guide, doing an undercover investigation. As part of [...]
We racked our brains, but couldn’t for a second think of who. A couple of years ago I was surprised and a wee bit disappointed when MSE, having been ‘hitwise number 1′ in our category for a good while, suddenly became ‘hitwise number 2′…. Hitwise is the big web traffic measurement firm owned by Experian. After [...]
When we were in New York a couple of months ago, Mrs MSE and I walked into a restaurant in order to have a healthy salad. Then we saw on the menu that they were 1,600 calories each… We don’t have that kind of info on British menus. However yesterday’s Sunday Times reported the Government [...]
I’ve just seen the stats for July and for the first time ever over 10 million different people used MoneySavingExpert.com in a month. Staggering! The actual stats according to our internal Google analytics software are as follow: Number of people who visited: 10,004,323 Number of times they visited: 18,109,454 Number of pages they read: 79,865,443 [...]
The UK’s in the midst of the biggest benefits policy changes for a generation, and of course that’s reflected in the MSE forums, the UK’s biggest place to discuss money. Yet the team and I are dismayed and infuriated; one person has accused us of being “complicit in a hate crime” because we allow benefits [...]
table.special { border-collapse:collapse; border:1px solid black; } table.special td { padding:5px; vertical-align:middle; } I feel a bit like Joey from Friends… How you doin’? I’ve just spotted the ‘insights’ section of my Facebook page and been rather surprised by the profile of members on there, it’s packed with women. So for stats lovers here you [...]
I received a letter from American Express yesterday promoting its “Express Cash Facility”; effectively trying to pump me to withdraw cash from an ATM on a credit card. That’s bad enough in itself, but nowhere on the letter did it tell me it’d charge 27.9% interest for the privilege… For years we’ve had more and [...]
