This is where your finance takes place

For our parents’ generation, many of those everyday tedious tasks that we all need to do were done by post, at a local branch or over the phone - it could take hours, even days to arrange - then came the Internet.

Whilst some of us may still switch the computer on a little nervously, for many millions the web has become the easiest way to get those irritating chores out of the way so we can concentrate on the good things in life. Home insurance is one of those irksome jobs that we can now do quickly and comfortably from our own homes, and it can save us precious time and money.

There are several advantages of using the Internet over more traditional means.

Firstly, given the vast array of companies out there promoting all manner of offers, it is a daunting task to wade through them all in more traditional ways, such as walking around town in and out of insurance brokers’ offices with arms full of leaflets or trying to speak to a real person on the phone. The Internet offers many trusted sites, such as uSwitch or property website like Rias, which can compare dozens of house insurance policies for you for nothing and suggest ones that best suit your needs, consequently saving you time.

Secondly, another sound reason for spending some time surfing the net is that there are good discounts on home insurance to be had which you will not find elsewhere – UK supermarkets are currently a good bet – ASDA Finance, for example, currently has a 10% discount on home insurance but only if you apply on-line. In fact, the advent of the Internet has created a whole new army of companies that operate purely on-line offering great value insurance services without the added costs they would have based in the High Street. Basically, there are some cracking deals online that many providers with expenses premises to run find difficult to match.

Thirdly, the Internet allows you to input your personal information, describe your insurance needs and get quotes at any time of the day or night to suit your lifestyle, rather than doing it over the phone between 9 and 5 on a weekday often in work time. In addition, the web is easy to navigate, enabling you to jump between sites to compare policies, premiums and offers, and you can bookmark favourites to come back to later.

Fourthly, sales staff tend to work on a commission basis and so, given that their wages are part of their mindset when discussing insurance with you, they may be inclined to persuade you that you really need a slightly more expensive policy with increased premiums than you actually require. Purchasing home insurance online bypasses the tiresome sales pitches and allows you to seek out honest, impartial advice and the policy that genuinely suits your needs.

Finally, there may be advantages to buying home insurance on-line but do not forget that a conversation with a real person is important, particularly if you are new to buying online, are unsure of anything in the small print, or you need to get an answer which you just could not find on the website. You can return to the web at any point once you have cleared up any questions or worries - it is then time to secure that great home insurance deal and get back to the nicer things in life.

If you’re thinking about seeking a debt consolidation loan, it’s important to stop and think about what types of debt you should include in the loan program and what should be excluded. If you have a significant quantity of high interest debt, you may be able to benefit from a consolidation plan.
No matter what type of debt consolidation loan you seek, it’s likely that you’ll be encouraged to take all of your existing debt and place it in one loan. In some cases, this is the best possible choice. Under other circumstances, however, some debt items should be handled in a different way.

Leave Student Loans Out

For example, if you have student loans, it’s not really advisable to include them in your debt consolidation loan. No matter what type of consolidation loan you get, it’s not likely that you’ll beat the interest rate or repayment terms associated with your student loans. However, if you have an alternative student loan, it’s likely that the interest rate is quite high. In this case, you may want to include it in your consolidation program.

Don’t Consolidate Interest Free Debt

It’s also possible that some of your outstanding debt doesn’t carry any interest at all. For example, some 0% credit cards – such as those offered by ASDA Finance – do not charge you for purchases for a limited period. In this case, it will be better to continue making monthly payments to your creditor rather than taking non-interest bearing debt and rolling it into a loan.

Consider Remaining Time to Payoff

It’s also a good idea to carefully examine even your high interest debt to determine if consolidating it is a good idea. Look at how much time you have remaining on the debt to determine if you should just keep paying it the way it is. For example, if you have a car loan that will be paid in full in less than a year, you’re likely to be better off leaving it out of the consolidation.

What to Consolidate

Credit card debt is almost always best handled by a debt consolidation loan. If you’re carrying credit card balances, it can become very difficult to see your way clear of growing debt very quickly. It’s so hard to stay ahead of credit card interest that it is almost always a great idea to place them in a consolidation program.
The entire reason for getting a debt consolidation loan is to help you get out of debt faster. If you’re planning to pursue debt consolidation, you should be sure to include all of your high interest, long-term debt so you’ll have a solid long term debt reduction plan. You’ll be on your way to a debt free life if you choose the right items to consolidate, select an effective plan, and make your payments on time. To find out what you can offered take a look at Co Operative’s website for further information on loans and credit cards.

Before you can properly shop for something, you have to decide what you need. The first step in finding the right car insurance is to consider the coverage you need. There are essentially three standard types of insurance cover ranging from third party cover (protecting individuals against liability should they injure a third party or cause damage to a third party’s property) through third party fire and theft to comprehensive cover, which can offer additional protection for accidental damage, theft, fire damage as well as liability towards third parties.

Comprehensive car insurance providers such as ASDA Finance will offer a range of additional insurance coverage, while CIS are also a recommended provider of car insurance online. Before you take out your policy, however, it’s important to consider what you will need to include in your policy.
Essentially, the more bolt-on “goodies” you have, the higher the cost of your motor insurance as it’s likely they won’t be included as standard. So decide which of these bells and whistles you want and whether in fact you need any of them at all - you may be over insured.

Wherever you start looking, it pays to be armed with a few questions to make the best assessment of the policy that’s right for you. Here are a few key pointers:

• Is a courtesy car provided as standard if your car is stolen or written-off? Do you have to pay extra to insure the courtesy car?

• Is legal protection included? This type of protection applies in cases where, for example, you have a traffic accident that is not your fault. The policy offers the chance to be able to claim back your uninsured losses from the driver responsible. Generally, you will be offered cover up to £50,000 or £100,000 of legal fees. But bear in mind that the final decision as to whether the legal support is granted depends on the “win-ability” of any court action being considered.

• Does the policy offer roadside breakdown assistance? Is Europe covered? If so, this can cost a lot more.

• Do you pay extra for overseas cover or is it included as standard?

• What is the policy excess? What are the conditions? Many companies issue policies with a compulsory excess – although sometimes they may offer a voluntary excess. This refers to the amount of money you are willing to pay in the event of an accident. The more money you are willing to pay in excess, the lower your motor insurance premium.

• Does cover include personal injury, personal belongings or replacement locks?

• Does the policy include legal advice and medical counselling telephone lines?

• Will your insurer immediately authorise repairs from recommended agents? If you have to obtain quotes, the cost may be less.

• Will your no-claims bonus be affected if the accident wasn’t your fault or the cost cannot be recovered?

• Can you transfer a no-claims bonus built up while driving on somebody else’s insurance? They may also offer you a no-claims bonus if you are the named driver on someone else’s car insurance policy.

• Can you transfer your no-claims bonus to a second car?

• Can you protect your no-claims bonus? How many claims are you allowed under the scheme before your no-claims bonus is affected?

• Will you be charged extra for paying your car insurance by monthly direct debit?

You don’t need to get caught without car insurance. Finding insurance quotes is both cheap and easy. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to find the right auto insurance for you. It is illegal in most states to not have the proper car insurance.

The buy to let phenomenon is one of those incredibly successful ideas that crops up every now and then and makes a handful of people a phenomenal amount of money. But how did this method of making enormous profits work? The theory is relatively simple, take out a mortgage in order to buy a property and then rent it out to tenants. The rent covers the mortgage repayments and as the price of the housing soars, the capital value of the property increases each year. This investment process has been so successful that in just nine years the amount of money borrowed in buy to let mortgages has gone from nothing to £108bn. One investor even saw his initial £950 investment multiply countless times over the last five years into a portfolio that is now worth almost £8m.

In the current climate, however, it’s not so easy to turn a profit. Property prices have increased 182% over the last decade, and it seems as if the market has become overvalued. This, coupled with a worsening world economy, has meant that even optimistic predictions for the next year are that prices will stay the same, with some suggesting a decrease of up to 20%. Many buy-to-let investors have found that house prices are so high that the money they recoup from rent is not enough to meet the dual cost of the mortgages and their additional duties as the landlord.

In other areas there have been a huge amount of buy-to-let properties on the market, driving down the cost of rent, and therefore further reducing the amount of profit that investors can make. Because there are so many rentable flats available, many prices have been driven down and there is less capital to be made when the time comes to sell.

One possible solution is to try and purchase the houses at a rate far below that of market value because homeowners need to sell fast, often in cases where people have defaulted on their mortgage, and the former owners are then offered the opportunity to be tenants on their home. Obviously, though, with large numbers of buy-to-let investors looking for the same opportunities, these severely reduced prices can be pushed back up by the competition.

In reaction to the credit crunch, lenders are also less willing to take risks, and many now refuse to lend on new-build properties, particularly in city centres where the property market is awash with new-build flats. Others are demanding much higher deposits of about 25% to ensure that there is some equity in the property in case of the investor defaulting.

So what is the future for the buy-to-let market? With rising mortgage rates, and a certain slowdown in the increase of housing prices, the potential for making profit has been markedly reduced. For the moment the future does not particularly bright, until the current global credit problems are resolved. Unfortunately the profitability of such a scheme requires on a steady increase in house prices, which are already at untenably high levels and out of the range of a number of first time buyers. Many people have made large profits from the buy-to-let scheme, but it looks increasingly like the bubble may have burst.

If you’re investor and you’ve just seen a great opportunity, then it’s still worth looking into the market. Take a look at Alliance and Leicester’s buy to let mortgages for some of the lowest APRs for buy to let investors on the market. It’s also worth taking a look at their mortgage calculator to see what you can afford.

For your average student going away for a weekend, or even a week, travel insurance is rarely regarded as an essential. The general perception exists that the principal purpose of travel insurance is to cover medical costs abroad in the eventuality of something going horribly awry. No one intends to be hurt or fall ill whilst travelling, and in general as the odds of anything adverse happening is low, insurance can – and often is – perceived as an extra and unnecessary expense.

Of course, the point of insurance is that it is there to provide cover if the unlikely happens, and the more times that it is unnecessary the better. This is not a reason not to have it though, because for the ten times that the insurance policy is not required, there will be one time when it suddenly becomes the most essential item you could possibly have taken with you.

So, how to get around this problem of people travelling without any insurance? Well firstly the above-mentioned misconception needs to be addressed. Yes, medical costs are a large component of the cost of a policy, but it also covers emergency evacuation to excess rental car damage and just about every possible disaster (big or small) in between.

Broadly speaking, when you choose to take the step from hotel to hostel you expect a certain drop in standard to go along with the drop in price. Sometimes, unfortunately, that drop in standard comes in the form of the security of the rooms. Nearly everyone knows someone who has had something stolen whilst travelling - although, it is curious how often something that is ‘lost’ eventually gets represented as something that was ‘stolen’ when hostels are involved. At any rate, the fact remains that things do go missing when travelling, and the smaller the budget that you’re travelling on, the greater the risk of things going missing. For this reason, it is always worth budgeting for travel insurance; it is a small investment that will provide protection against accidental damage and loss, or theft. AA Travel offers a single trip insurance that pays out upon the occurrence of any holiday mishaps.

At which point, the fact that your travel insurance policy covers loss of personal possessions can be incredibly useful. The attitude that insurance is an unnecessary expense is one that swiftly reverses when the £7 saved on not having insurance is wiped out by having to spend £200 to replace items that have gone missing.

Ultimately, though, whether people take out travel insurance or not is something that is up to them – and there’s no way of enforcing that people do. For the benefits that travel insurance offers, surely the few minutes and the few pounds that are spent to get a policy is an investment worth making. For budget travellers, the appeal of a low-cost flight is highly appealing. Travelzoo pool together cheap flights from across the internet, so thrifty travellers can book with the knowledge they are getting the best deal.