Laura Whitcombe

Within the space of a week, it has been announced that another 189 high street banks and building societies will be shutting their doors through the course of 2017. Last week, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank outlined plans to close 79 branches. On Tuesday, HSBC reported it will close another 62 branches on top of the 55 previously announced. And yesterday, Yorkshire Building Society admitted it will be closing 48 branches, including all 28 Norwich & Peterborough branches as it goes ahead with killing off the brand completely. Existing N&P current account holders have been told to find alternative accounts. The companies have largely attributed the closures to customers increasingly turning to their online services.

Britain’s biggest mobile operator EE has been fined £2.7 million for overcharging more than 30,000 customers. Between July 2014 and July 2015, the company added almost £250,000 to the bills of customers who called its 150 helpline while abroad in the European Union. They were incorrectly billed as though they had made a call to the United States and charged a rate of £1.20 a minute instead of 19p. EE was fined more than 10 times the amount it overcharged as punishment for failing to refund affected customers until its regulator, Ofcom, stepped in. The company had previously maintained it was unable to trace individuals who had been mistakenly billed and suggested making a donation to charity instead.

There are just 19 dreary January days left to complete your online self-assessment tax return and – here’s the important bit – pay what you owe. Miss the midnight deadline on Tuesday 31st January and you could face a stiff financial penalty. More than 10 million of us were organised and settled our annual accounts on time last year, but nearly 900,000 let it go down to the wire. HM Revenue & Customs reported that 823,000 taxpayers waited until the 30th and 31st to file their returns. The Revenue’s single busiest day for returns was the 29th January, when 513,271 people submitted their records.

This year, I’m swapping my debit card for a credit card. It’s not because I’m starting 2017 in the red. It's to make sure I stay comfortably in the black. My New Year’s resolution is to make my money go further – and this is where my credit card comes in. I’ve taken inspiration from friends and family who’ve long been rewarded for paying for virtually everything other than their mortgage and bills on credit. I’ve watched as their spending has earned them perks including concert tickets, meals out, hotel stays and even free flights. So my plan is to do what they do – pay for everything that doesn’t incur an additional charge with my credit card and clear the balance in full every month.

I thought I’d be a pretty cheap date on holiday abroad this summer. I’ve abstained from all alcohol for the past eight months, including my beloved Siglo rioja, as I get ready to become a mum. So I expected the savings we’d make by only one of us drinking while on our road trip through France and Italy to offset the crazily expensive road tolls we clocked up as we travelled through the Mont Blanc tunnel, passing over the top of Milan to get to Venice. Boy, was I wrong. In most of the restaurants and cafes we visited it was actually cheaper to order a glass of wine than a soft drink. An Orangina was easily €3.50 in Annecy, Strasbourg and Lake Garda. But in Lake Como and Venice, things got silly.

How I long for a detached house with a drive – and, more importantly, no neighbours. My current abode is a three-bed semi with no off-street parking. It’s a free parking street but before you think I’m boasting, it’s also close to three primary schools, has a corner shop and most of the residents seem to be building loft extensions. Taken together, it adds up to pretty painful parking. It gets even worse when one of the tank-driving neighbours is home as he frequently takes up two spaces, which is particularly vexing when I’ve got a boot full of heavy groceries and there are no spaces near the house.

I recently returned home from a fortnight’s holiday only to fight to get my front door open. Not because the emptied bins had been left on the doorstep yet again, or because I’d left a key in the lock. No. Instead, a sea of junk mail had flooded my hall, jamming the door as I tried to get in. The worst offenders were local take-aways and restaurants. I counted eight Domino’s pizza menus alone, which given how long I was away means the chain must be clocking up flyer drops at a rate of at least one every two days. These were accompanied by countless broadband, TV, phone, clothing and homeware mail-outs promoting deals of some kind or other.

I’m standing at the edge of a financial precipice. I’m a 32-year-old woman doing a job I love. I’ve been beavering away solidly for 10 years and I’ve been working hard to climb my way up the career ladder. After starting out in London surviving on a pitiful cub journo’s salary, I now earn enough money to pay my bills, do and buy what I want – within reason – contribute to a pension and put a little bit away each month. But within the next three months, all that will change. I’m pregnant and my first baby is due in six weeks. I’m one of the hundreds of thousands of British women only entitled to statutory maternity pay while I take time off from work to raise my child during its first year.

‘I've slept with people for money and I've been on dates with disgusting guys and put myself at risk just so I could have dinner and some leftovers for the next day.’ These are the harrowing words of a female first-year student describing the extraordinary lengths she went to in order to pay her way at university. She found herself turning to ‘sugaring’ websites, which mostly introduce older wealthy men willing to lavish expensive gifts and cash to young women in return for company and often – but not always – sex. And as well as partnering ‘sugar daddies’ with bright, young things, the websites also connect ‘sugar mummies’ to them too.

The national obsession with the Bank of England base rate is beginning to make my blood boil. If low interest rates were the saviour of the Great British economy they’re heralded to be, why are house prices sky high? Why are young renters finding it more difficult than ever to buy one? Why are savers and pensioners seeing their incomes shrink? Why is the average British household expected to have racked up £10,000 in unsecured debt by the end of the year? None of these things make me thank my lucky stars I’m living in low-interest Britain. What I believe we need is tax cuts – that’s what will get people spending, stimulate demand and bring about growth. To date, the low-interest-rate environment has failed to do so.

With just a week or so to go before schools break up for the summer, are you one of the families trying to save money on your holiday by pulling the kids out of class early? If so, I salute you. And I’m a school governor. After all, they’re mostly watching films or larking about in the playground at a time when there are real savings to be had if you can travel – right? One teacher told me she looks forward to the last week of term when children have been taken out of school early. ‘So much easier to teach 24 than 30 isn’t it? Why do you think private schools do so well?’. OK, I’m being churlish and, of course, there are still plenty of important lessons being taught in classrooms throughout the land.

How do you spot a good estate agent? No, I’m not about to tell a joke. It’s a serious question. With a baby on the way, the need for a double spare room for visiting first-time grandparents and more space to work from home, I’ve started to wonder how much longer our growing family will fit into our compact three-bedroom semi. We can’t face the hassle of a loft extension and together with the lack of parking we’ll likely sell up in the next year or so. And when we do, we’ll become sellers for the first time. I didn’t pay much attention to the estate agent I used when I bought my home. After all, I wasn’t paying them and all that mattered was the house, its price and location.

It’s ten years since I graduated and I’ve just managed to clear my student loan, which isn’t a bad achievement on a journalist’s salary. The day I finished my politics and economics degree, my debt stood at £11,500. That covered the course and living costs for three years of study and a year spent in industry – for which I still had to pay half the annual course fee despite not setting foot on campus. In the years that followed, interest started to mount up and added another several thousand pounds onto my repayments. I count myself lucky to have repaid my loan after such a relatively short period compared to how long it could take those graduating right now.

It's officially summer but not in New Malden. I got home at 7pm last night in near darkness and pouring rain. Normally, closing the front door behind me and casting off my rain gear is enough to bring some relief. But not this time. The rain followed me in. As I walked into my kitchen I was greeted by an all too familiar sound – drip, drip, drip. My leak is back. The long story cut short is that water is getting in where the single-storey kitchen extension joins the old back wall – and not for the first time. I’ve previously spent more than £2,000 trying to put it right. The fix lasted a while but, now that's no longer the case, I'm in a dilemma.

We’re failing our children with financial education by postcode lottery. The subject finally found its way into the curriculum for secondary schools in England two years ago but if anyone thinks the job’s done, they couldn’t be more wrong. It’s true that all English comprehensive schools now have to cover the subject within maths and citizenship classes - the devolved nations have been teaching it for years. But there’s no assessment and no mandatory teacher training. Free schools and academies don’t have to teach it either. It’s hardly a winning formula and means that while some schools are teaching the topic brilliantly, others do so abysmally. And there’s little to persuade the latter to do otherwise.

Your current account provider is probably rubbish value for money and you’d be better off switching banks. That’s the message the Competition and Markets Authority put out earlier this week. The watchdog reportedly spent £5 million on a lengthy report that took ages to write, £5 million to do what I just did in one sentence that took seconds. Maybe the CMA should have hired me to pen the report and saved the taxpayer a fortune. But I digress. Of course, the CMA is correct in its findings and consumers really should be more aware about the value their bank account offers them and the merits of switching.

This piece is from the new issue of Spectator Money, out on Thursday 19 May. The magazine will come free with your next copy of The Spectator, and will also be available to read online at spectator.com/money. We’re all getting older. We’ve just celebrated the Queen’s 90th as a very special occasion, yet by 2027 there will be a million of us in the UK aged 90 or above, according to the Inter-national Longevity Centre (ILC). Ten years beyond that, 65-and-overs will account for nearly a quarter of the population. Longevity is a luxury if it’s accompanied by good health. It also comes with many challenges, not least the need to make your accumulated wealth last longer. The cost of care is a particular concern.

As your mourners assemble at the churchyard to say their final farewells, you want them to be thinking of you fondly – don’t you? The last thing you need is them cursing under their breath because they've forked out for the funeral or arguing about how to split your art collection because you failed to include it in your will. But it seems the vast majority of us are making life troublesome for our family and friends at the time of our departure. Only a quarter of the population has bothered to speak to their nearest and dearest about what they actually want from their funeral. Burial or cremation? A bamboo coffin or in the shape of a favourite surfboard? Limo or horse-drawn carriage?

It's official. I'm a grown up. I have a baby on the way and my husband and I have just ordered a new family car. We checked it had the Isofix car seat fitting system, selected the window blind option for the rear seats and made sure that our travel system (which seems to be the new name for a pram) fitted comfortably in the boot. The make and model we've gone for is a bit of a step-up from the 11-year old Ford Focus we've been tearing about in for the past six years, so rather than wipe out our entire cash reserves we decided to go for a finance deal. 'It's never been cheaper to buy a new car on finance,' said the dealer, and he's pretty much spot on.

‘That’s Asda price’ is a thing of the past. The slogan’s long gone and so, it appears, is the retailer’s commitment to offering customers value for money. The regulator has just singled it out by demanding a written pledge that it will change its ways when it comes to promotional deals, which have been criticised for being somewhat dodgy. Asda was far from alone in over-egging its special deals for customers. The regulator’s been investigating most of the big UK supermarkets since consumer group Which? launched a ‘super-complaint’ last year, after finding evidence of misleading prices.