Personal finance news
Despite all the reports about everyone living beyond their means on plastic, hard cash is still the king apparently.
According to research by the British Retail Consortium, we used notes and coins for around 56% of all payments during 2008, with cash used on 33% of occasions in shops.
Cash is still popular as a means of budgetting of course – you’ll here many people say that they can manage their money better when they see what they actually have to spend.
Do you have a fake £1 coin in your pocket or purse? There’s a chance you might as apparently one in 20 of the pound coins in circulation is a fake!
The Royal Mint recently confirmed the percentage of fake pound coins in circulation has increased from 2% to 2.5%. But it has been suggested that the testing equipment is not sophisticated enough and the real percentage could be as high as 5% – or one in 20 coins. A car parking company ran it’s own tests with a sample of 2000 pounds coins withdrawn from a bank and they found that 3-4% of those coins were counterfeit.
So, how can you tell if your pound coin is a potential fake? Try these two simple methods:
The price of both Royal Mail first and second class stamps goes up today – 6th April, 2009.
The price of a first class stamp rises from 36p to 39p – an increase of 3p or 9.2%
The price of a second class stamp rises from 27p to 30p – an increase of 3 or 9%
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?
