Personal finance news
According to a report from the Post Office, on average we’ve all got at least £10 just lying there at home.
How’s that? I hear you ask. Well, the average person has £11.07 of foreign currency just lying around at home. My wife reckons we’ve spent all our euros so we’ve hardly got any of those left over. I’ve got a feeling I’ve got a couple of dollars at the back of a drawer somewhere!
How about you – do you always come home with a few pounds worth of foreign currency?
Folding money is exactly what origami artist Won Park does for fun. The 38 year old Hawaiian specialises in making amazing things from dollar bills!
The camera (pictured) is just one of many items that Park models from dollars. Others include such things as frogs, fish, Star Wars and Star Trek space ships.
Apparently, he started using dollar bills as his paper of choice in junior high school and now doesn’t any other form of paper.
Of course over here in the UK we no longer have an equivalent to the dollar bill. Did you know that the pound coin replaced the pound note 14 years and 1 day ago.
Yep, the pound note was withdrawn on November 12th, 1984. The pound coin was introduced the previous April and the BBC reports that the then Chancellor Nigel Lawson announced to Parliament the demise of the quid note.
Despite the recent interest rate cut by the Bank of England, the average rate of interest on credit cards is on the rise.
Research group Defaqto has studied the rates of some 240 credit cards and reports that since May the annual percentage rate (APR) has risen from 17.2% to 17.6%. Certain cards have seen bigger increases; a NatWest card rate has increased from 13.9% to 16.9% – thought that is still lower than the average.
I don’t have any figures for rates in store cards but bare in mind that such cards typically attract higher rates of interest. You might find that unless you clear the balance in full each month on a store card, the rate of interest outweighs any first purchase discount that you’re offered.
Forget the gold, platinum or exclusive black credit card even – the new card to have is the diamond card.
Oil and gas reserves have made many industrialists in Kazakhstan very wealthy – and a new credit card named Diamond lets them show it.
Issued as a Mastercard by Kazkommertsbank the Diamond card has a 0.02 carat gem in it’s centre. The bank plans to issue around 1,000 of the cards at the rate of 30/month. The allocated credit limit will be $50,000 – that’s about $20,000 higher than upper credit limits on some platinum Mastercards. It’s not something new though as Dubai residents had a similar card last year.
Kazakhstan is now home to a new class of super-rich due to it’s plentiful reserves of oil and minerals. To many this contradicts their view of a country made famous by Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional character Borat.
