Moneyblog

It's known colloquially as the death tax, and for good reason. Inheritance tax - the bane of modern life - dates back to 1894 when the Government introduced estate duty (a tax on the capital value of land) in a bid to raise money to pay off a multi-million pound deficit. Its 21st century incarnation includes a tax on property, money and other assets of someone who has passed away. The thing about inheritance tax (IHT) is this: no one really understands it, and the complexity is not helped by the Government's constant tinkering around the edges. Put simply, everyone has a tax-free allowance, known as the ‘nil rate band’. The tax-free threshold for the current 2016-17 tax year is £325,000 where it has been since 2009.

There are some American imports for which we should be thankful. Not Donald Trump, obviously. Other things, though - the motor car, baseball, Dolly Parton, chewing gum, and, erm, crayons. On the other hand, there are a number of US products we could do without. I'm thinking here of evangelical preachers, sub-prime mortgages and Spam. Then there's Black Friday. While this day of frenzied shopping has been part of the American calendar for decades, it's a recent UK import. Always falling on the day after Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of November - so the 25th for us Brits), Black Friday's hype spirals year after year.

Cast your mind back to Saturday, 5 November. It is 8.30 am in Edinburgh and Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins is sitting down to breakfast. The taxi he orders every weekend has picked up the papers from the local newsagent so he can flick through them over salmon and scrambled egg. Higgins likes his taxis. He spent £18,000 swanning around London in them between March and October 2015. He also likes his reading. He’s a voracious absorber of anything from Robert Graves and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Carver. Hence the pile of papers. Children flick in and out of the breakfast room – he has six of them. Life could not be better. It is a lovely start to the weekend for the former Standard Life actuary who was paid £2.

When I was at school in the, er, 1980s, there was no such thing as financial education. Yes, we had maths lessons but they focused on the hypotenuse and mastering scientific calculators. I still break out in a sweat at the thought of trigonometry. Since my day (when all this was fields etc etc), the curriculum has changed significantly. No more Home Economics - I think it's called Domestic Science now - and I'm guessing that ballroom dancing has been replaced by something altogether more modern. I also suspect that the fledgling word processing lab at my high school has morphed into a 21st century cutting-edge centre where coding lessons are commonplace. Given the pace of change over recent decades, I'm wondering why finance is still so neglected in the classroom?

It’s that time of year again. Mindful of the impending big Christmas shop, people start counting up credit card reward points in the hope of turning them into vouchers and cash. But they could find that their loyalty hasn’t paid off. Reward credit cards can be a useful alterative to debit cards because they offer a little something extra on each spend, such as points. However, not all cards are as rewarding as they seem. In fact, shoppers could be earning very little each time they use their card if the rewards are limited to where the money is spent. In addition, some cards charge considerably higher interest rates than those that offer no rewards at all, so consumers could be paying over the odds for a few points here and there.

The insurance industry is the boring uncle of the financial services family - a little drab and likely to be found in a basement listening to Daniel O’Donnell on a Saturday night. By contrast, banking conjures up colourful images of Wolf of Wall Street excess, which has helped to fuel a healthy dose of scrutiny. Being boring has shielded the insurance industry from its fair share of scrutiny for far too long. Issues have emerged that don’t receive the level of scrutiny they deserve. Readers of this article will be all too familiar with freefalling savings rates. It’s a bitter pill, but we’ve swallowed it.

It’s always puzzled me why there’s still such a taboo around gambling in the UK. If you count people who play the national lottery, more than 50 per cent of us have had a flutter over the past four weeks. And if you like to think of playing the lottery as making a charity donation rather than gambling (are you sure about that?), there’s still almost one in three of us who have gambled in the last month. Like most things, gambling needs to be done in moderation. Lose control and it can have disastrous life-changing effects. But the majority of people who enjoy a flutter manage to do so without becoming homeless or owing money to a shady guy who says he’ll break their legs if they don’t repay the cash.

Scepticism has a solid place in the history of British philosophical enquiry. Back in the 18th century, empiricists such as David Hume dedicated their lives to the importance of suspending belief in things for which there is insufficient evidence through experience. On the whole, it’s a tradition our culture has maintained. Scepticism rears up in daily life all the time - for example, when your mother-in-law asks how you are, and you think: 'Is the asking of this question sufficient evidence for me to believe that you really are genuinely interested in how I am?

For one in seven people alive today, Facebook is their window on the world. More than one billion of them log onto the social network on their mobiles each and every day. Facebook knows their hopes, dreams, secrets and fears. It knows who their friends and family are and what they look like. It knows what interests them and who they are likely to vote for. Armed with this vast amount of information about the real-time behaviours, likes and dislikes of users, Facebook will have a very good picture of personality and attitude towards risk. That insight will become increasingly valuable, as we shall see. This week, the insurer Admiral announced plans to use Facebook to help set car insurance premiums for new drivers via an app, which would read social media posts.

It's about time. The city watchdog has announced it will take action to improve competition in the current account market. Let's face it, current accounts are a bit rubbish, aren't they? Many offer 0 per cent interest no matter the balance, overdraft charges can be extortionate, late payment fees are astronomical and, despite years of industry pleas, switching accounts is still seen as a pain in the neck. To add to customer woes, back in August the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published a number of recommendations aimed at shaking the retail banking industry, including ordering banks to share customers' information with third parties from 2018 to make it easier for them to find better deals. The report ran to 700 pages and cost £5 million.

Would you rent out your cat? What about your lawnmower? Or your driveway? That first one may not be practical but new research shows that, as a nation, we are embracing the sharing economy, whether that's pets, home appliances or our living spaces. It's good to share. My sister has instilled that virtue in her young daughter although, admittedly, neither her nor I were very good at it when growing up. I recall many arguments over weekly deliveries of Just Seventeen magazine, not to mention rows about favourite toys and treasured books. Maybe if money had changed hands, we would have been better at sharing?

Nuisance calls are the bane of my life - as are unprompted texts. They assault my mobile at all hours, night and day. I find the calls so annoying and invasive that I now leave my phone on permanent silent which kind of defeats the object of a mobile (I don’t have a landline at home). No wonder most of my friends have given up on me – ‘unsociable ginga, never answers his phone’. Of course, my mother, still as matriarchal as she was 50 years ago when I was wearing shorts,  isn’t impressed at all. Voicemail message one:  ‘Jeffrey, why didn’t you answer my last call?’ (Jeffrey, as opposed to Jeff, is a sure fire sign that mother is annoyed with me.) Voicemail message two: ‘Jeffrey, where have you been?

My heart aches for the one in eight people so traumatised by a burglary that they move house, for they risk further emotional and financial pain. New research from Churchill Insurance paints a terrible picture of the aftermath of burglaries. People feel violated and vulnerable in a place they should feel most safe. Many can’t sleep. Some lose confidence in themselves, and can’t bear to be alone in the property. Some take medicine. A stranger has gone through their possessions, and they could have come face to face with them. Saying goodbye to sentimental items hurts more than the loss of expensive but replaceable stuff. Homes feel tainted or spoiled, especially if they were trashed.

A growing number of Brits would rather throw a party than turn on the central heating a few days early, according to a survey out today from TopCashback.co.uk, the cashback and comparison website. To cut heating bills, seven in 10 are taking the obvious step of wearing extra layers of clothing and, slightly less obviously, moping around the house in hats, scarves and gloves. Pubs are increasingly being shunned in favour of drinking at home with friends and family. One in ten are taking the chance of holding homemade cocktail nights and, in a touch evoking echoes of Abigail’s Party, the classic Mike Leigh study in embarrassment, to save on heating groups of friends are taking turns to host get-togethers. It sounds like a recipe for excruciating social awkwardness.

Bank staff might no longer recognise your face when you walk into a branch – but a banking app might. Biometrics (the authentication of your face, voice or fingerprint) are among the futuristic features offered by a new breed of banks which reckon branch networks, call centres and websites are on the way out. These days it’s all about the app and, in some cases, the app alone. If you want to grab some of the best savings rates on offer, opening and running your account on your smartphone is your only option. Atom Bank is currently topping the tables for one and two-year fixed rate bonds (at 1.4 per cent and 1.55 per cent respectively) but doesn’t have branches or a website you can log into. The app-only bank promises 'the future of banking, available today'.

Television has a lot to answer for. The terrible reputation of the building trade for one. But not all builders are out to wreck your house, rob you of your life-savings and leave you in need of rescue by Nick 'DIY SOS' Knowles, the slightly smug TV-expert builder who goes round making good the mess other builders have left behind. Then again, not all builders are honest, trustworthy and committed to doing a good job. Inviting builders – or any of the associated trades such as plumbers, heating engineers, electricians or carpenters - into your home is a modern minefield, pitted with bitter recriminations and empty bank accounts. Much of this could be avoided if people knew how to talk to their builder in the first place.

My niece is four-years-old. It's no exaggeration to say that her social life is better than mine - by some considerable distance. In the past few weeks alone she has attended two kiddie raves (don't ask), explored the ginnels of Skipton Castle (that's alleyways to non-Northerners), seen Disney on Ice (Frozen, naturally), made baked apples at CommuniTree in the local park, attended a badge-making course, and spent many happy hours collecting conkers. Over the same period I have sat at my computer, binge-watched DCI Banks, sat at my desk some more, and, er, that's it. I did go to Skipton but only because my niece was making the trip. Of course, I realise that keeping kids entertained doesn't come cheap.

Social investment is starting to transform the way that parts of our economy work. Social investments include loans and shares into organisations whose principal purpose is social. They have grown by around 20 per cent a year for the last five years, according to Big Society Capital, the organisation that helps social enterprises and charities to raise finance. It estimates there is now £1.5 billion invested into social-purpose organisations, £427 million of which was new investment last year alone. The market is set to get a huge boost from social impact tax relief (SITR), which some are calling the Government’s best kept secret.

OK, I'll admit it. I don't like Margaret Atwood's writing. In some circles, this is akin to saying you're a devil worshipper who spends their weekends ensconced in a dungeon of pain with other ostracised members of the community. Yes, I know she's a multi-award winning author. Yes, I'm aware she has sold millions of books. But I thought The Blind Assassin - for which she won the Booker Prize - was one of the dullest novels I've ever had the misfortune to read. I was willing it to end, much in the same way that I longed for Anna Karenina to fling herself under that train and put both me and her out of our misery.