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It’s show time for new money advice service


By SPP Reporter



The Government’s new Money Advice Service website will help you work out where the pounds are going.
The Government’s new Money Advice Service website will help you work out where the pounds are going.

NOT again! It cannot possibly be that time of year again. For goodness sake, we have only just managed to steer ’Er Indoors slowly and painfully out of the dense alcoholic mists of Hogmanay; and now here we are, about to crash land straight back into the electric soup. Yes folks, it is show time – Canisbay Show, to be exact.

It starts with the handicrafts, and bales of wool stacked everywhere. Sit on the couch, and clouds of talcum powder will engulf you and you are liable to get a knitting needle in your tender portions. An entire flock of prize Suffolks stands chittering in the north breeze, just to produce one pink baby bonnet and matching mitts.

Then the kitchen fills with the subtle aromas of burning tyres and three-year-old silage as she faces the challenge of rhubarb jam and three fruit scones. Imagine an explosion in a Branston Pickle factory and you will begin to get the picture.

Finally, the flower arranging. How can showing a bunch of flowers require the deforestation of 50 square miles of Brazilian rainforest? As though the A9 is not already busy enough at this time of year with nose-to-tail Italian caravanettes, without convoys of Dutch flower vans groaning up Berriedale.

And all of that is just in the preamble – never mind the terrors of the day itself. What is it about beer tents? Is it the smell of fresh-cut grass? Or the gentle flapping of the canvas in the force eight easterly? Or the rain, dripping through the holes in the roof and splashing into the whisky? Whatever it is, to ’Er Indoors, the call of the beer tent is like the song of the whale summoning her young, reverberating across the world’s oceans, calling her inexorably home. It’s gonna be messy.

IF your finances are looking a bit messy, there is a new source of help available. The Government has now completed the launch of the new Money Advice Service, which is well worth looking at. The service is not a source of regulated financial advice, so they do not – indeed, they cannot – offer you specific financial products or services. Their role comes before the fine detail, in helping you get to grips with the big picture.

The new website – www.moneyadviceservice.org – has a pretty comprehensive menu of resources all designed to help you understand how you can make the best of your finances in a range of different scenarios.

One of the best is their budget planning tool. There are a number of budget planners available, but most of them are geared to a specific situation such as applying for a mortgage, and are usually completed in the heat of the moment so the result tends to be just “can we afford this?” rather than a more holistic view of all the options available to make the best of your resources.

The beauty of the Money Advice Service budget planner is that you complete it yourself, at home, with no pressure on you, and you can store your details and keep coming back to them as often as you like until you are sure you have the details exactly right.

Like all such systems, it is a clear case of GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. To get the best out of the plan, in other words, it is important to take the time and do a bit of research to get the most accurate input that you can.

The system cannot help you with this – only you can figure out where all the money goes, and the best place to start is with your bank and credit card statements.

The regular payments are easy enough to pick up – mortgage payments, insurances, council tax and the utility bills are mostly obvious direct debits on your statements. More tricky are the variable expenses like the weekly shopping, which can vary quite a bit; and most difficult are the exceptional items like holidays or Christmas.

That is why you need to go back over at least a year to see how much you have actually spent on repairs to the old Volvo – or in the beer tent at the Canisbay Show...

keithmuir@lineone.net

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