Emma Lunn

The average cost of attending a wedding is £800 per couple, according to a press release from Nationwide which landed in my inbox earlier this week. The building society completely ignored the fact that single people attend weddings too. Nationwide says wedding attendance costs can really mount up ‘especially if you’re going as a couple’. Er, no, you idiots, no no no. Simple calculations confirm going to a wedding solo costs loads more than going as a couple. Unless you can find a pal to split costs with, you’ll be stumping up for petrol, accommodation and a present all on your ownsome and out of a single salary.

Ah, home ownership. It’s the holy grail of living arrangements, isn’t it? No more nasty landlords and money-grabbing letting agents. Now you’re king or queen of the castle and you can install a hot tub in the garden, paint a Banksy-style mural on the wall, and finally get the canine friend you’ve always wanted. Or can you? If you buy a leasehold property you’re likely to find you’re bound by as many, if not more, rules than you were as a tenant. And if you think the rip-off fees stopped when you bought your home, think again: letting agents are mere amateurs compared to unscrupulous freeholders and the equally dodgy management firms they employ. Bitter about that time you were charged £300 to sign a new rental contact?

Little-known rules regarding ‘death-in-service’ payouts from workplace pension schemes could see grieving families hit by shock five-figure tax bills. That's according to Royal London which says millions of employees are at risk of exceeding the pension lifetime allowance because of their death-in-service benefits. As a result, it’s calling for a change in the rules. Many company pension schemes offer workers’ families a lump sum ‘death-in-service’ payment of up to four times the employee’s annual salary if they die while employed by the firm. But a little-known caveat of this payment is that it can count against the £1 million lifetime allowance limit for tax-relieved pension contributions.

Going through a loved one’s photos, books, music collection and possessions after they’ve passed away can be an emotional process. But with any luck, the deceased will have left a will detailing what should happen to smaller possessions such as childhood toys and their record collection, as well as major assets like property or investments. But not many people think about what will happen to their digital assets when they die. We live our lives online these days and future generations won’t remember a time when this wasn’t the case. As well as using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, we also buy digital music and video files, and back up our digital lives to various cloud services.

United Airlines will be cursing the day someone had the bright idea of building cameras into mobile phones. Video clips showing a semi-conscious 69-year-old man being dragged from an overbooked plane after he refused to disembark went viral last week, sending the airline’s reputation into a tailspin. For those who’ve been on a really long media-free flight for the past week, here’s what happened. Last Monday passengers boarded flight 3411 in Chicago bound for Louisville, Kentucky. But before it took off, United decided it needed to squeeze in four crew members who needed to be in Louisville for work the next day. It asked for four volunteers to be bumped off the flight in return for $800 each but, when no one came forward, crew members picked four passengers at random.

Savers cashing in their pension pots has led to the government raking in almost twice the tax it estimated the new pensions freedoms would generate. Experts expected that people withdrawing cash from their pensions would spread the withdrawals – but savers have taken bigger amounts in one go, leading to more cash in the Treasury’s coffers. Since April 2015 pension savers have had much more freedom about what they do with their defined contribution pension savings. From the age of 55 they can take the money as cash, buy an annuity, use income drawdown, or combine two or more of the options. Savers can withdraw 25 per cent of their pot tax-free while other withdrawals are taxed at the saver’s marginal tax rate. The Treasury expected pension flexibility to raise £0.

How far do you think £321 would get you from London? Halfway across the world maybe? Asia? The US? All of these are possible if you hunt around for cheap flights. But in the wonderful world of UK train travel, £321 of your hard-earned cash buys you a return trip from London to Manchester, a mere 326-mile round-trip. There are cheaper train tickets, admittedly, but that’s the price a client paid for me to travel to Manchester to do a day’s (high standard and very reasonably priced) consultancy work for them. Their big mistake was not to book the ticket three months in advance or tie me to set trains each way. Fools. But the experience has provided me with a handy anecdote whenever I talk or write about train fares.

Among the baby photos and moans about the weather cluttering up my timeline the other day, a Facebook post by my friend Elaine caught my eye. She’d been trying to buy tickets for a Jamiroquai gig at The Roundhouse in London on 31 March. Armed with one old-fashioned telephone and three devices, she’d been desperately dialling and refreshing web pages since the moment the tickets went on sale. But the tickets sold out in minutes and she wasn’t one of the lucky ones. My first thought was ‘why am I friends with people with such terrible taste in music?’ My second was ‘I bet the tickets are already for sale on Viagogo for loads of money’. I was right, of course. I always am.

Ah, January. The month when the nation’s gyms are full of red-faced newbies looking confused on the cross-trainer or baffled by the battle ropes. According to new research by American Express, the most popular New Year’s resolution for 2017 is to achieve a healthier lifestyle, with a third (33 per cent) of Britons planning to exercise more and a further 30 per cent hoping to eat healthier. This commitment to physical wellbeing ranks ahead of saving money which 28 per cent of respondents cited as their New Year resolution. The two rarely go hand in hand – if you splash out on membership of a big fancy gym, losing lbs generally equates to spending the other type of pounds.

What happens if you wander into Tesco, help yourself to some food and walk out without paying? I haven’t tried it but I reckon those big burly security guards that Tesco employs (well, they do in my corner of South London) will be straight after you. The police will probably turn up blue lights a-blazing, arrest you and it will all end up in court. At best, you’ll have to pay Tesco for the food. At worst, you’ll have a criminal record. But the law works a bit differently when it comes to landlords and tenants. While rogue landlords face various fines and penalties, tenants are seemingly free to fleece one landlord after another. Take my friend Bob (not his real name). He’s a nice guy.

Anyone can get rich. All you need is a positive mindset and a few quid to hand over to a self-styled ‘guru’ who will teach you the secret to financial freedom. And who better to instruct you than billionaire Donald Trump? Well, that’s what a bunch of wannabe millionaires in the US thought anyway. They paid up to $35,000 (£28,000) for courses at Trump University (entry requirements: cheque book) where Trump’s ‘hand-picked’ instructors would reveal the ‘secrets’ of real estate (or the property market as we call it in the UK). When the secrets failed to materialise, three lawsuits alleged that Trump University defrauded students by using misleading marketing practices and engaging in aggressive sales tactics.

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'.

If I had £1 for every press release I’ve received in the past fortnight telling me how to save money on the new iPhone 7, well…I could buy an iPhone 7. But I wouldn’t because my existing phone (a Samsung something or other which cost about £200 a couple of years ago) works perfectly well. The press releases landing in my inbox have been full of big ideas. 'Best time to buy iPhone 7 is six weeks after launch,' advises MoneySuperMarket, which can apparently see into the future. 'Hold the handset! Don’t buy a new iPhone 7 until you find out this trick to save £100s,' screams Gocompare.com.

Sitting on the lanai (balcony) sipping a beer, the wind gently rustling through the palm trees and my Hawaiian hosts’ adorable puppy licking my toes: life was sweet. I’d struck gold. I was living the Airbnb dream. David and Doug treated me like one of the family, complete with days out and home-cooked meals. Nothing was too much trouble. When they dropped me off at the airport (no extra charge), we vowed to be friends forever and I cried the whole flight home. I experienced Airbnb exactly the way it was meant to be - living like a local with the locals. But back in the UK it’s a different story.

There was victory for a group of mortgage borrowers last week when Court of Appeal judges ruled West Bromwich Building Society had wrongly upped interest rates for about 6,000 customers. However, despite the legal wrangle being described as a 'David and Goliath' type duel, not everyone was pleased for the little people winners. That’s because the borrowers concerned were landlords, a group which is fast becoming one of the most vilified sectors of society. But if the buy-to-let critics could put their prejudices aside for a moment they’d see that a victory for landlords this time is a win for consumers everywhere. The court case came about after a controversial decision by West Brom back in 2013. It had flogged 'tracker' mortgages to the landlords.