Woo hoo!

Moneymapgie is finally here – and just in time for the Spring!

Thanks for your interest in the fledgling site. We hope www.moneymagpie.com will be a pretty fab all-round money site – and most importantly, one that will give you all the info you need to live a richer life in every sense.

There won't be much more to see here - but Jasmine's blog is just getting cracking at www.moneymagpie.com/blogs/jasmine

We’re now in the run-up to our official, all-singing all-dancing launch – during which time we will adding new stuff including regularly updated articles and, soon, a brand-new messageboard system so you can really get involved. Hope to see you there soon!

e’re gently easing the site out onto the worldwide web over the next few weeks and, in these early days, we’re still making sure that everything works as it should. Be gentle with us! Please feel free to get in touch with any comments on the site so far, or suggestions for what you’d like to see in future.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that moneymagpie.com has been promising for a while that we'd go live on Monday, 2nd April.

That's what we'd all thought at Magpie towers - and with days to go, we're geared up to launch with all the best of the info to help you live a richer life all round. But then, at the last minute, we heard the dreaded words... server issues.

We've been moving the site over to its own server, ready for all your clicks to come through. Unfortunately is taking our darling techies a while to do and we can't unleash the site on to the web until it's all sorted.

But fingers crossed - the server should be sorted in a few days' time, which means we should be up and running in time for you to read while munching your first Easter egg.

Many thanks to everyone who's shown interest so far - and all those who have signed up for the newsletter. We've been chuffed to bits with the response and will be sending out a welcome message to all our new subscribers once we hit the web. Now, back to that server...

Budget Schmudget

He gives with one hand and takes away with the other. Yes, it was nice to get a cut in the basic rate tax from 22% to 20% as of next April but taking away the 10% lowest rate band will negate the good effects for many. Raising the Isa limit from £7,000 to £7,200 is pathetic, particularly as it raises the mini cash Isa limit rather than encouraging long-term savings in the Stock Market. The IHT raise was similarly too little too late. We think the threshold should be closer to £1 million, not a paltry £350,000. As for no Stamp Duty on carbon neutral homes, not a bad idea but how many of those are on the market? We would have liked to see a major reduction on Stamp Duty for first-time buyers and a massive increase in the tax for people investing in buy-to-let properties to even the balance.

It looks like another 'love me, please vote for me' budget - this time aimed at the struggling middle classes/middle incomers who are quantifiably worse off now than they were when Labour first came to power. They are the ones most likely actually to vote in the next election but they are also the ones who feel the most angry with this Government.

Frankly, we think that Gordon 'personality by-pass' Brown doesn't have much of a hope if he does become the new Labour leader, no matter what the tax cuts. Not only is he just not attractive to the general public but across the board people are sick of Labour and their empty promises. Having said that, though, there's very little else to choose from...very little.

Identity Theft

The Freakonomics blog gives us a heads-up on their forthcoming article in the New York Times about identity theft. It's a subject that exercises the minds of Americans more than Brits, I think, but it's still a serious issue here. Certainly getting more serious as fraudsters get cleverer in their methods.

The internet has made it a lot easier for dodgy types to get our money. Just look at this fake Bank of America site. Unless you're a sophisticated internet user it's easy to be fooled. Worryingly, Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) says that in this paper called “Why Phishing Works,” computer scientists Rachna Dhamija (Harvard) and J.D. Tygar and Marti Hearst (both at Berkeley) found that the best phishing sites were able to fool 9 out of 10 people.

One thing we will be doing on the Moneymagpie site is updating readers with information of the latest scams as they come along. No small task as new ones come up all the time. Just a few days ago, a friend forwarded an email she had had through a recruitment site which offered her a 'job' receiving payments by BACS. The email went: "It is a part-time job that consists of receiving payments from customers (through bank transfers) and then making further payments to our main office or to one of our regional affiliated departments, depending on the customer's location. Your commission as an agent is 6% of each transaction. For example, if you receive 2000 GBP to your bank account, you will withdraw the money and keep 120 GBP for yourself. Your salary will be approximately 12000 GBP per year. The hours for this work are flexible and can be combined with any permanent or other part-time job, with an average workload of up to
10 hours a week."

Dodgy? It has to be. Sounds like either money-laundering or a type of cheque-clearing scam. But, as she said, it also sounds enticing. That's where the problem lies. We have to be more careful than ever.

Cheap is not always Cheerful

We are already being asked to write articles for other publications and websites, but not all of them are suitable!

We have just turned down an offer from a financial company (which shall remain nameless - might as well, they're all the same anyway) to write a piece for their magazine about how to 'unlock the value in your home'. Originally we thought it was going to be a piece on how to make money from your home through renting out a room or hiring it as a film set. But they said they wanted an article about how to remortgage or take out a secured loan on your home in order to invest that extra money in one of their trusts or pensions or whatever.

Ha - like we would! OK, investors around the world borrow to invest on a daily basis. It's how the world of finance works. But to encourage individuals, and particularly those with families, to risk the roof over their head for investments that may or may not come good is just madness.

Anyway, it goes against what we preach about paying off your mortgage as fast as possible, not increasing it. We also fundamentally dislike secured loans and shout at the TV anytime Carol Vorderman or her ilk appear on those scummy adverts trying to get people to risk their homes for a quick loan. They may be cheaper than unsecured ones on the whole but at the unacceptable price of potentially losing your house. As a last resort, or for people who really know what they’re doing and already have other investments and insurance policies elsewhere, secured loans can be a nice cheap way of borrowing (and then investing in, say a buy-to-let property or a business or an investment you think is pretty much a winner) but not for most people. We’re £1.3 trillion in debt now as a nation – we didn’t get to that stage by being savvy with our borrowing. We don’t need any more encouragement to borrow more.

Or do we? Let us know what you think.

Banks etc

I was on BBC Breakfast News this morning talking about what the banks might do next - i.e. are we going to see the end of (relatively) free banking so that they can make more than the paltry £40 billion they made last year that they can barely surive on, poor lambs?

Frankly I think it could go either way. On the one hand pretty much every other country in the world has chargeable banking so there will be a big temptation simply to follow suit. On the other hand - £40 billion?! - they're doing pretty well with this business model so why change? Giving stuff away for free so that you can charge for add-ons is working well with the internet too so lets stick with it. Maybe banks in other countries will look at the British model and decide to follow what we're doing. London is not the financial centre of the world (sorry New York) for nothing.

If our banks did start charging they would have to do it multilaterally. If just the big high street banks started to charge then some of the smaller banks like Nationwide, Abbey National or Co-op might decide not to follow suit in order to tempt in new customers. That could work, so long as we don't continue to be as apathetic as we have been and just stick with the old bank because it's easy.

If just a few start charging though, they could suffer in the short-term at least. First Direct saw last year what a PR nightmare it can be to start charging for current accounts, even with get-out clauses. It would be interesting to know just how many people closed their accounts with them after their announcement.

The thing is, banks are there to make money for themselves - in particular for their shareholders - they are not Government-run establishments that have our best interests at heart. If they are stopped from making money out of us in one way, they will definitely come up with cleverer ways to replace that money. Also, the Government (including Government-funded agencies like the FSA) is not ever going to rush in and stop them making money out of us in sneaky ways because they are far too important to our economy.

So basically, we're on our own. It's up to us to wise up to what each bank is doing, and play the system to our own advantage. We should complain more often and more effectively, move if we don't like what our bank does (even if that means moving once a year) and pretend we're not British and really campaign vociferously for improvements to the financial services sector.

The most expensive street in the country is in my borough - Kensington and Chelsea - I have not been surprised to learn today from a BBC item on the website. Kensington Square (a very nice, though busy, square just behind Kensington High Street) has the highest-priced property in the country, closely followed by a bunch of other froo-froo streets around the borough (see the list below).

I should be pleased but I'm not. It's all insanity. One of my neighbours who has a lot of investment property told me yesterday that she is putting on the market the flat she owns in my building. It's a rather dingy-looking one-bedroomed flat with a tiny lobby, a shower room, a small double bedroom (one double bed and about a foot of space around it) and a living room with a kitchenette in it. How much has it been valued at (according to her)? £400,000. This is just stupid. It would need at least another £20,000 spending on it to make it good, I consider, and I really hope that it stays on the market for some time until she is forced to bring the price down.

We are in line for a 'correction' in house prices. The question is when. In the meantime, if you're interested in big numbers, the ridiculous rises - almost daily round here at the moment - at least make entertaining reading.

TOP 20 MOST EXPENSIVE STREETS
	Street Name	Area	Average value
1	Kensington Square	Kensington and Chelsea	£5,534,480
2	Chelsea Square	Kensington and Chelsea	£5,098,047
3	Carlyle Square	Kensington and Chelsea	£4,727,542
4	Thornwood Gardens	Kensington and Chelsea	£4,696,139
5	Cottesmore Gardens	Kensington and Chelsea	£4,662,633
6	Gilston Road	Kensington and Chelsea	£4,582,113
7	The Vale	Kensington and Chelsea	£4,488,764
8	Carlton Gardens	City of Westminster	£4,354,313
9	Ingram Avenue	Barnet	£4,323,591
10	Eldon Road	Kensington and Chelsea	£4,254,850
11	Albert Place	Kensington and Chelsea	£4,216,660
12	Victoria Road	Kensington and Chelsea	£4,216,500
13	Mulberry Walk	Kensington and Chelsea	£3,975,900
14	Winnington Road	Barnet	£3,805,664
15	Campden Hill Square	Kensington and Chelsea	£3,796,243
16	Douro Place	Kensington and Chelsea	£3,792,433
17	Neville Street	Kensington and Chelsea	£3,758,067
18	Egerton Crescent	Kensington and Chelsea	£3,614,762
19	St Albans Grove	Kensington and Chelsea	£3,576,717
20	Chester Terrace	Camden	£3,481,783
Source: mouseprice.com