Stock Ex

Save Money With Investments & Online Savings

The Internet is a great way of saving money, and with a little bit of surfing, it isn’t too hard to find yourself some attractive deals. I have listed just 3 ways of saving money, and these 3 will likely appeal to the majority.

Stock Market Investments

A great way to build capital is through the shrewed investments that can be made on the stockmaket. Lots of very stable growing companys will make you greater returns than conventional banking. Using a good broker service and a nice spread portfolio you can make sure money do very well.

Home Insurance

Insurance premiums, the name for payments made to insurance companies, depend on the insurer, the level of cover and how risky you’re perceived to be. Therefore start by defining your cover and ensuring you’re as low a risk as possible.

Plus, if you’ve not got ‘normal’ circumstances eg, you’ve made a claim in the past few years, are in an area prone to flooding or subsidence, do ensure you tell the insurer. If you don’t and then try to claim, even for an unrelated issue, your whole policy may be invalid. With insurance the golden rule is to ‘tell them the whole truth and nothing but the truth’.

Beware ‘pay monthly’ options – usually the insurer actually just loans you the annual cost and then charges interest at hideous rates on top. So either pay for it in full, or if you can’t afford it, use a credit card with a lower APR rate (or better a 0% credit card for spending ensuring your repayments are big enough to clear it within a year).

Some insurers currently have online promotions where you can pay monthly at no extra charge.

A common mistake is to cover the house’s market value (the amount it could be sold for), meaning many people are over insured, paying too much.

The amount you cover (called the ‘sum insured’) should be the ‘rebuild value’; simply the cost of rebuilding the property if it were knocked down.

So the real key isn’t location, but cost of materials, labour and architects. However it’s important any building policy covers the cost of somewhere for you to stay while your home’s rebuilt.

To find a rebuild value, commissioning a survey is most reliable, but is expensive unless you’re getting one anyway (eg, buying a new home). The best online resource is Moneysupermarket or asking an insurer to give you a rough value based on standard assumptions.

Credit Cards

Sometimes simply calling and asking for an interest rate reduction works. The credit card market is competitive and interest rate matching policies are common. If you’ve already got a cheaper rate on another existing card, this should help you batter them down. Simply call up and say, “I need cheaper debt, but I prefer not to leave you.”

Transferring a balance means you move debts to a credit card from another card for a fee of around 3%. For example, if you balance transfer to the Barkercard from the Corbettcard, in practice the Barkercard pays off the Corbettcard for you, so you now owe it the money instead.

The absolute best balance transfer offers used to be preserved for introductory offers for new cardholders, but an increasing number have existing cardholder offers too.

Some card companies offer special deals applying online, some have official set rates, others target individuals, but before you make your Finance Choices, it is important to be prepared.

Holidays

There may be a recession on, but we all still want to go on holiday. The media might think that staycations are the newest craze and holidaymakers will be flocking to British holiday locations, but if you still want to jet off abroad you can do it – on the cheap. Here’s are our top tip for cheap travel this summer.

The first port of call when booking a holiday has to be the Internet. Whether it’s a package holiday or you’re booking accommodation and flights separately online deals outstrip those available on the high street or with telephone booking services. This is simply because these services involve having a sales team which the company has to pay, so their salaries are added to your holiday prices.