With less than a week to go until a budget the government has repeatedly warned will be"painful", a rising number of landlords are creating limited companies to hold buy-to-let properties. Read this and the rest of today's money news below - and watch the latest episode of New Money.Can Bitcoin get this club to the Premier League?
Sign-up criteria like minimum age, UK residency, email addresses or app downloads force some shoppers to pay 10%-33% more for affected items on average."This means a 17-year-old single parent living independently would not get a discount on baby food at some supermarkets, while a homeless person would have to pay more for a meal deal at others," the group said.
A Tesco spokesperson said:"Clubcard unlocks the best value at Tesco, with shoppers able to save £360 a year." "They have had to review their portfolios over the years due to changing taxation rules," says Moneyfacts finance expert Rachel Springall. Aneisha Beveridge, head of research at Hamptons, said:"While landlord purchase numbers are well down on pre-pandemic levels, there's been no sign of a slowdown in the number of companies being set up to put them in. Most new purchases are now made in a company structure.
There are options available to track down your lost cash, according to Chris Blackwood, spokesperson for the PPI's Pension Attention campaign. If you're interested, it will set you back a cool £3m - one of the brand's most expensive models to date. "I feel like I've been punished twice," Chris says, once for the original offence and again with the banning order. It causes inconvenience with things like doctor's appointments and shopping for him and his elderly mother.
"At some point, she would need to raise taxes even further or risk widening the fiscal £22bn 'black hole', which given the tax rises already proposed in the budget, is a scary possibility." If that number rings a bell, it is because this is the much-vaunted, but not much understood,"headroom" figure a lot of people in Westminster like to drone on about.
Third, the debt rule used by this government actually focuses on a measure of the national debt which might not necessarily be the right one. Might Reeves declare, at the budget or in the run-up, that it makes far more sense to focus on overall PSND from now on? Quite plausibly. And while in one respect it's a fiddle, in her defence it's a fiddle from one silly rule to an ever so slightly less silly rule.
The problem with these measures is they are subject to quite a lot of revision when, say, accountants change their opinion about the value of the national road or rail network. So some would argue these measures are prone to more volatility and fiddling than simple net debt. Ms Reeves would not be drawn on what measure will replace the current rule but there is speculation that she will favour using public sector debt net of financial liabilities .
"Under the plans that I have inherited from the previous Conservative government, public sector net investment as a share of our economy was due to decline steeply during the course of this parliament," she said. "The second role is about being responsible. By seizing the opportunities, but doing it in a way where we are making sure we're getting value for money for every pound of taxpayers' money spent.