Business and Personal Financing

Author: admin

  • DIY PPI Claims

    A lot of people were suckered into buying PPI backed loan policies without an understanding of what they were paying for, thanks to the illegal selling practices of banks throughout the UK. Since this was discovered, we’ve all seen the thousands of adverts run by law firms which specialise in PPI claims, to help people regain the money they spent on the payment protection insurance.

    It is unfortunate that so many people have chosen to use these services, because the small claim courts which have established the PPI claim policies have made it very easy to do. All it takes to claim your money back is to send a letter to the bank responsible for the policy (using the template found on the money advice service website is a great idea) and gather all of the information you have on the plan, including evidence of payments you’ve made.

    It is very beneficial to do your own claim, as it means that you don’t have to pay 30% of your payout to a “no win no fee” company. As they amount of work you have to do in both cases is typically the same, you end up saving time as well.

  • UK GDP Slowed in Final Quarter of 2014

    While the overall economic news for the UK in 2014 was good, the final quarter showed evidence that the economy may be slowing, with the growth rate reducing to 0.5% between October and December.

    Looking more closely at the details of growth, we see that the services industry is still going strong, but that the mining, construction and production industries have slowed, and in the cases of construction and production, both have actually shrank. This doesn’t bode well for the conservative economic platform and their goals, as they were aiming for an economic shift away from a consumer driven economy to a more productive one, and the results of the last quarter seem to suggest that the opposite has occurred.

    Whether or not this loss of momentum is indicative of a continuing slow-down in our economy is still up for debate, but with the negative factors influencing our economy expected to persist, the outlook still isn’t totally positive.

  • Managing your Own Pension Portfolio

    Some people choose to manage their own pension and investment portfolios and they do this for a number of reasons. It may be due to a lack of trust, or that the value that they’re getting from the outsourced management of it isn’t worth the cost, or they just want to be in control so that they can decide what they do and don’t invest in. Whatever the case, you do need at least a basic understanding of investments to do it yourself.

    One of the best things that you can do when investing is to choose safe things to invest into, and distribute your risks as much as possible. The most stable thing is generally gold, which almost always increases in value. Other commodities are also usually a solid investment, but if you’d invested in oil, then you’d certainly be regretting that decision right now.

  • What’s Behind the Falling Oil Prices?

    The oil price is made by a complex combination of factors which influence the price. The overarching factor is of supply and demand; that basic market principle. Due to the economic engine of china slowing down over recent years, demand for oil has decreased massively, with most economists arguing that that decrease in demand is largely responsible for the drop in oil prices. Alternatively, or at least a contributing factor, is the change in strategy within OPEC, with them increasing production of oil to keep the price low.

    OPEC is the abbreviation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which consists of countries from the middle east, with the exception of Venezuela. Saudi Arabia’s oil minister has been on record saying that OPEC is in agreement on oil production policy, and that they will not decrease production in order to keep the prices high. When asked for the reason why, he said “Whether it goes down to $20, $40, $50, $60, it is irrelevant,”, arguing that lower costs means good things for the global economy.

    Other people contend that their reason for this policy is less altruistic, and instead is a means through which they can reduce the production in the USA by making the costs of extraction there too high to turn a profit.

  • Falling Oil Prices

    As most people now know, oil prices have recently fallen to the lowest price since 2009. This change has many effects on the global economy, and while most people would assume they would be good changes, the truth is that it is a largely mixed bag of positives and negatives.

    Falling oil prices has a largely positive impact on consumers of oil around the world, but as the oil market is such a large part of the global marketplace, the detriment it causes to producers of oil can have a negative effect on everyone.

    If you take the USA as one example and Russia as another; the USA has re-emerged as a global producer of oil, but what they’ve been contributing to the market place has above average costs when it comes to the extraction, which only made sense to extract due to the high oil price; Russia is the place which is perhaps the hardest hit by the fall in oil price, as one of the biggest global contributors of oil, and it playing such as massive role in the country’s economy, balancing the nation’s books with such a massive decrease in revenue could be disastrous.

    The damage such a decrease in oil price could cause to these two nations and countries in OPEC could end up hurting everybody, so although having low costs at the pump is good for consumers, the end result could be bad for them.

  • Why People Decide to Remortgage Their Home

    Hi There! Welcome to our blog, which you will hopefully find very educational.

     

    For most people, their homes represents the largest portion of wealth; they get a mortgage so that they can acquire the building, and then they spend years paying it off so that they own it out-right, and so that they don’t have to pay interest on their loans. This all sounds very reasonable, so you might ask why people would want to re-mortgage their home.

    The answer usually comes down to their plans in life; it could be that they’re trying to build a business, and they don’t have the necessary relationship with their bank to get a business loan that will cover it, or it could be that their children are looking for a deposit on their own home, and they don’t have the cash spare to do it.

    As has been said, a home is usually a persons most valuable property, so getting a loan with that as the collateral gives them the opportunity to get more liquidated cash than they are likely to get otherwise.