Spectator Money

If you’ve got a chunk of money that you don’t mind having locked away for a set amount of time, fixed rate bonds can often give a better rate of return than most accounts. Here are this week’s picks of the best one year fixed rate bonds on the market at the moment.

Monet spinner The National Gallery was criticised for charging £22 for an exhibition of Monet’s work, although the rest of the gallery is free. How much do you have to pay for art? Uffizi, Florence €20.75 (£18) New York Metropolitan $25 (£17.75) Louvre, Paris €15 (£13) Hermitage, St Petersburg $25 (£17.

If you're looking to move house or become a first-time homeowner any time soon, this week’s Best Buys – of two year fixed-rate mortgages – is worth having a look at.

Used properly, a purchase credit card is often the cheapest way to borrow – but make sure you pay back what you've borrowed before the interest-free time is out. This can be for anything up to 31 months, as you can see in the data below. Here are some of the best 0% Introductory Purchase Rate Credit Cards on the market at the moment, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

This is an extract from this week's Letters pages in The Spectator Sir: One objection to an increase in National Insurance contributions to rescue the NHS is that it would once again exempt from contributing those who most heavily use the NHS — the retired — and heap yet more of the burden on the working young who least use it and can least afford it (‘The Tory tax bombshell’, 17 March). As you acknowledge, National Insurance contributions long ago ceased to be purely contributions into a pension and sickness benefit scheme, and became part of general taxation. This means that entirely exempting retirees from contributing when many of them are on incomes larger than the working young is quite impossible to justify.

If you’re on the hunt for a mortgage, a fixed rate one will ensure that your repayments stay the same. Here are some of the best rates available for five-year fixed rate mortgages on the market at the moment, according to data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

If you can afford not to have immediate access to the money in your account, then a notice account often gives a better rate of return than other accounts. Here are the best ones available at the moment, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

How do you go about choosing a pension plan? For many of us – especially if you are part of a workplace pension – it’s something you tend to just accept. Bearing that in mind, the recent research done by Portafina into the response times of various different pension providers might make you think twice about simply accepting whichever pension scheme comes your way. While the most responsive Defined Contribution pension providers took a relatively short time to provide basic information needed to advise clients ­(just over a week), the worst performing schemes took over five weeks to provide similar information. When it comes to Defined Benefit (Final Salary) schemes, the results were even more dramatic. While the best performing company, Diageo, took 1.

If you have credit card balance on an existing account, you could save vast amounts of money by transferring that balance to another card. Here are this week’s selection of the best cards with a 0% introductory balance transfer rate, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

For those of us with a decent amount of savings money going spare, investing a lump sum in a fixed rate account will guarantee good returns – just as long as you're happy to wait patiently for it to mature. Here are some of the best five year and over fixed-rate bonds on the market at the moment.

If you’re thinking about investing your money in cash, but want a tax-efficient way to do that, this week's Best Buys, of two year, fixed-rate ISAs, might help you out.

Looking to get into the buy-to-let market? These two year fixed-rate mortgages might be of interest to potential investors.

Will 2018 be the year that you finally get round to buying a new house, or even become a homeowner for the first time? If so, this week's Best Buys – of two year fixed-rate mortgages – is worth having a look at.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, was worth an estimated £40 billion. Yet the eighth richest man in the world drove an old Volvo, flew economy class, bought his clothes in flea markets and had his wife cut his hair to avoid the cost of a barber. Some other wealthy tight-fists: — The oil entrepreneur J. Paul Getty, worth $6 billion when he died in 1976, famously installed a payphone for guests at Sutton Place, his home in Surrey. — Wall Street financier Hetty Green was worth $200 million when she died in 1951. It would have been a little less had she not lived in a small apartment, used charity health clinics (leading, it was said, to the amputation of her son’s leg) and only washing the hems of her dresses to save on soap.

Four Japanese tourists complained to police after their restaurant meal of fish, steak and water cost £243 per head in Venice.

If you've got a chunk of money that you don't mind having locked away for a set amount of time, fixed rate bonds can often give a better rate of return than most accounts. Here are this week's picks of the best one year fixed rate bonds on the market at the moment. Data supplied by moneyfacts.co.

0% balance transfer credit cards can help you to save money on any existing credit card balances by enabling you to pay less interest.

Last September, Henry Jeffreys wrote in these very pages about the trend for rare whiskies and how – if you’re thinking about investing in alcohol – they might be a better bet than first-growth clarets. He told us of how whisky writer Ian Buxton ‘told me about visiting the Bowmore distillery on Islay in the 1990s and seeing bottles of Black Bowmore 30-year-old whisky gathering dust and priced at around £100 a bottle. One sold this year at auction for £11,450.’ ‘The world’, wrote Jeffreys, ‘has gone whisky mad’.

The ISA limit for this year is set at £20,000, and with many bank accounts offering minimal interest, it might make sense to consider an ISA – no matter how small your savings might feel. Here are the best variable rate cash ISAs on the market right now, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

This week's Best Buys are high interest current accounts: Data supplied by moneyfacts.co.