Financial Update - Summer

Many people struggle to make the mortgage payments and the threat of losing your home unfortunately for some people becomes a reality. We provide a brief article here that may help you to cope with your situation.

During this economic slowdown, many employers need to reduce their workforce to cut costs, and some businesses may close down. This is not an easy situation to deal with but hopefully the article here can help you move forward positively.

A great way to save money on meals out or on family outings is to use Tesco Clubcard vouchers. All you need do is sign-up to the Tesco Clubcard and earn points on your food shopping. On their website you can then turn those points in to Clubcard vouchers. Those vouchers can then be exhanged for "deals" whereby they offer you 4x the value!

For example, say you have enough points to obtain £10 of Clubcard vouchers. You can exhange the £10 for £40 worth of "deal" tokens. Those tokens can be used in loads of places such as Bella Italia, Pizza Express, Legoland, etc. You can have a £40 meal for £10!! One of our friends even saved enough points for a £1,000 holiday in France which only cost them £250.

Simply speaking the APR is a measure of how much a given loan or mortgage will cost you in interest per calendar year. The APR calculation takes into account the interest charge and also all of the additional costs associated with the loan, such as arrangement fees, annual charges (which may be the case with credit cards), etc. The purpose is to provide a clear, overall figure for the total cost of the loan.

It is easy to work out - divide the interest (including the additional charges) paid in the first year by the size of loan (i.e. capital outstanding) and express this as a percentage (i.e. multiply it by 100). Easy!!

Many loan providers will quote a headline-grabbing low interest rate which doesn't take into account any additional charges. However, they are obliged by law to also quote the APR on their promotional material. The lender must do this in order to give you as the customer a clear and simple way to compare the cost of loans like-for-like.

All other things being equal, the loan with the lower APR is the cheaper option.

Today’s affluent society tends to drive a “me first” and an “I deserve” culture. Television adverts and lifestyle magazines purposely bombard us with the perfection of others and the life improving and happiness giving possessions they have.

They encourage us to think that we deserve more in life, that we must “get ahead of the Joneses”, be more successful, etc. The natural and perhaps inevitable consequence of this is that it raises a feeling of discontentment with our lot in life. This in turn feeds a materialistic desire to spend our way out of our misery, insecurity, insignificance and lack of self-worth, towards a seemingly more satisfied and successful life that these other people clearly have, obviously by buying the products advertised on the television and in the lifestyle magazines!

So, what does the Bible say about this? Click here for a short article that provides a biblical perspective on this subject.