Banking is a brilliant business to be in, because it’s fairly easy to make serious profits.
Indeed, for hundreds of years, banks have been a cornerstone of British commerce. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, stock market-listed banks accounted for about a sixth of the value of [...]

Let me guess how you got your first credit card: you applied for one from the bank which held your current account, right? By sheer luck, you may have found your ideal plastic, but, with 1,300 different credit cards to choose from, the odds were firmly stacked against you.
If you’re going to be a cunning [...]

At The Fool we like to focus on the big things, because it’s the big things that count the most: switching mortgages, reducing debts using balance transfer cards, and cheaper personal loans. But small things do add up too, so my editor suggested I write an article with some tips on less obvious ways to [...]

“There is no such thing as a good tax.” (Winston Churchill)
Although grumbling about taxation is an almost universal pursuit, the fact is that society can’t survive without taxes, which are the glue that holds nations together.
Without taxation, every service which is currently provided by our government would have to be purchased privately. This would put [...]

Earlier today, I searched Google for the words “bank” and “rip off” and found around 160,000 results for UK-based websites, including several of my own articles.
Indeed, as I explained in A Tale Of Two Bankers, the days of bank managers in bowler hats are long gone. Nowadays, many bank managers are glorified salesmen, under constant [...]

Earlier this year, Halifax, the UK’s biggest mortgage lender, revealed that housing expenses for a typical British household rose by almost a sixteenth (6%) in 2004/05.
However, the general level of inflation (which measures price changes) is around 2.2% a year, so housing expenses are rising at a much faster rate than the cost of other [...]

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” — business proverb
Sadly, until about eight years ago, I’d never done any financial planning in my life.

Back in 1998, I started with a single, simple goal: to rid myself of the massive debts which I’d built up from gambling, overspending and generally squandering money. In total, [...]

Ken Fisher is chairman of Fisher Wealth Management, and a long standing Forbes Magazine columnist.

In the media, it’s all subprime, all the time. Headlines claim a credit crunch will sink shares, spike interest rates and tank the economy. As evidence, it highlights soon-to-be bankrupt subprime lenders and a handful of failing hedge funds.
Don’t buy it! [...]

Buying a home can be one of the most exciting, and most nerve wracking, decisions of your life. There are many different things to consider, such as, can I (we) afford it, what type of mortgage should I get, should we buy now or wait for better interest rates, and should we choose a fixed [...]

Being refused credit is a lot more widespread than many people believe, and that’s often because of the stigma attached to it. No-one wants to admit to having been refused credit.
The reality is that Banks and financial institutions typically decline more than half the applications they receive. Following advertising regulation changes imposed by the Office [...]