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Premium Bonds. Calculate your odds.

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

Recently I was beaten by a maths equation.  Not fun for a numbers nerd like me, until I realised it was a calculation so difficult it’d take some serious IQ power.  In the end to defeat it I recruited a post doctoral cosmology statistician; and on the back am very pleased to have developed the first ever Premium Bond Calculator that actually works out your odds of winning.

Accurately cracking this conundrum been a pet peave of mine for a while.  In the past I’d written an article with a basic assessment Premium Bonds: Are they worth it; yet to give a legitimate answer to a question such as “if you’ve £2500 in a premium bonds, what are the chances of beating a top savings accounts returns over a year” takes a lot more. 

Once the algorithm was written, using whats called ‘multinomial probability’; each time the probability distribution changes, it takes a powerful computer 14 hours to rework the answers.  Still sometimes the fun is just in knowing.   

Oh and the answer is you’ve only a 24% chance of beating the saving account with £2,500 in, if you’re a basic rate taxpayer.

Find the cheapest travel money in seconds

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

The problem with travel money has always been that there are a myriad of charges which confuse the actual rate.   Many people think “commission free” makes it cheap. It doesn’t. All it means is you don’t pay a fee, but it’s likely you’ll get a worse exchange rate.

In the past when interviewed on how to do it the cheapest way, I told people to ask lots of providers, ‘How many euros/dollars/yen will you give me, after all fees, for my pounds?’ and go with the one that offered the most.  The problem with this solution is it lacks the charm of a direct answer, so a few months ago I started to work with my team on an automatic solution to it; after all almost of the best rates are on the web, so there had to be an easy way.   So it's quite exciting for me that today I've got my new Travel Money Maximiser tool up and running.

Free £60 Sony Walkman mp3 player, but go quick

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

Free £60 Sony Walkman mp3 player, but go quick No scam its true. Apply for a Sony Pulsecard via some websites and you get 11,000 pulsebeat points, this is then enough to get one of Sony's sexy mp3 Walkmen worth £60 (and that's not a list price, its the price you'd actually have to pay to buy it). To get the points all you need do is 'spend on the card', but as spending isn't defined this means you can just go into a supermarket, by an apple or a pack of sweets and bish-bash-bosh you're done!

However this deal is rumoured to be ending very soon probably Tuesday (or it may shift to other websites). I keep track of all available current credit card freebies on my

Compare pizzas and save cash. A simple tip to ’slice’ down your costs

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

I arrived home on Friday evening to see a flurry of pizza delivery leaflets on the mat. As is common of their type, all included deals like “buy one medium pizza, get the second half price” or “special sale on giant pizzas”. As my mind’s always worked mathematically I couldn’t help working out which the best value deals was on each leaflet; for example are two 8″ pizzas costing £11 better value than one 12″ pizza costing £10.

It’s only school maths that’s needed to do it, so I thought I’d share it here (in case you’ve forgotten). The area of a circle is πr2 and from this we can deduce a simple rule:

Easy comparison of pizzas’ areas

Simply square (multiply by itself) the diameter (width) of the pizza. While this doesn’t give you the area, as the rest of the equation for area is a constant, then you can simply use these amounts as an easy way to compare relative areas.

An example will help

Imagine the choice is the following:

A. Two 8″ pizzas cost £11
B. One 12″ pizza costs £10

At first glance the 12″ pizza doesn’t seem that much bigger, yet actually it’s much bigger. Let’s do the comparison.

A. Square 8″ and you get (8x8=) 64. Yet there are two eight inch pizzas so we must double this to get 128.
B. Then simply square 12″ and you get (12x12=) 144.

What this means is you get more pizza buying one 12 inch than buying two eight inches. To be accurate there’s (144/128=1.125) 12.5% more pizza buying the 12″, and as it’s cheaper it’s a much better deal as its cheaper anyway.

The ifs and buts

Now of course this is based on simple maths, and some (probably pizza stores) may argue there are variants. If you wanted different toppings or different bases and they won’t do half and half, size is irrelevant. You could say the 12″ pizza actually has a thicker edge and argue there’s a little less topping space and redo the calculation, yet overall this simple rule helps.

A much cheaper way to do pizza

Now the regulars in the thrift specialising Old Style section of the Chat Forum on my website MoneySavingExpert.com would shout at me if I didn’t mention that making pizza yourself is massively cheaper and much easier than ordering it!

Martin

PS. For maths nerds. For those saying “he’s used the diameter but the equation is about radius”; please remember the equation is commutative and this is not about “finding the area” but “finding the relative area” so rather than making people halve the diameter to get the radius - the proportions are the same just by squaring the radius.

How to advertise a pole dancing club

How do you advertise a pole dancing club on TV? Just be straight with people. Or at least that's the philosophy that seems to have been adopted by the Valley Ball club of America. Check out their ad below(via the Consumerist):

Meet Spy Ted

More madness on the baby monitoring front... This Ted has a video camera hidden in his nose so you can spy on even the brightest of tots without them realising.

Says the manufacturer TeddyCam: "It may look like an ordinary toy at first glance, but don't be fooled; the TeddyCam is smarter than the average bear. Despite his cuddly appearance, this bear is outfitted with an advanced baby monitoring system that lets you watch your child on your own TV, without running wires throughout your home. AC adapters are included." Via boing boing

Don't Kill the goose that laid the golden egg

Much hysteria this week over Google and the information it holds on us.

It's true that if search is to become ever more bespoke, Google and others like it will have to carry on building their databanks. It's a tension that could define the information age: a growing thirst for highly personalised or relevant knowledge on the one hand and concern about privacy on the other.

But images of Google as Big Brother are over-blown. No company in history has ever given consumers so much for so little. Gmail, Analytics, Blogger, Documents, Maps ... the list is long, full of innovation and growing every day. What's more, it's all free. 

More important, perhaps, Google is also changing the corporate ethos. The "greed is good" culture of the 1980s and 1990s has given way to a new altruism - in Google's case a desire to better organise the world's information.

Of course in the long term it could all go tits up. Google could fall into the wrong corporate hands (there are many) or America could go the way of dozens of democracies before it and become a police state. But that's a different proposition entirely and not one that should stop the company in its current, largely benign, incarnation pursing the ultimate in search.

For the moment at least, it seems to me that Google remains a force for consumer good.   

Bolox to Hips

Can someone please tell me why the government is torturing itself so mercilessly over Home Information Packs (Hips)?

Labour came up with the idiotic scheme in opposition in 1995 as a way of embarrassing the Tories over one of the popular obsessions of the time - gazumping. By making sellers produce an information pack about their home before putting it on the market, argued Nick Raynsford MP, the whole sales process would be speeded up and gazumping made less likely.

The idea was fatally flawed from the start. At the heart of the home buying ....

Big Mother is Watching You

In the wake of Madeleine McCann's disappearance, interest in hi-tech monitoring equipment for children is booming. Some of it is down right spooky: There are cell phone spies that allow parents to read their children's texts; Jame Bond style trackers for cars that email you if your teen' starts speeding; alcohol and drugs testers that can be secretly fitted on the loo at home...

My colleague Richard Woods put an excellent piece together for last Sunday's paper on the subject, running through some of the products available and concluding that a lot of them are likely to do more harm than good. After all, kids won't learn to mitigate risks unless they take some in the first place. There is also the broader issue of trust to consider.

But one product that might be worth a look at is the Loc8tor (above), a British made device that can pick up a signal from a tag about the size of your thumbnail from as far as 600 feet away and then guide you straight to it. It can track up to 24 tags at once (great for large families!) and if you don't have quite that many kids you might want to attach the spare tags to your handbag, key ring or pets.

The device (which costs £99 for a top of the range set) can also be set so it sounds an alarm if one of your tags wanders outside a pre-defined distance. We've not tested one yet but plan to in the next few weeks. Let us know your thoughts on the practicalities and ethics of the subject...

Object of Desire N06

We love this book. In fact we think it's one of the sexiest coffee table browsers ever put together. Called Ice Cream, it contains more than 1,000 stunning images from 100 contemporary artists picked by 10 curators. It's been put together by the art publishing house Phaidon and showcases the work of emerging artists from around the world.

To be included, artists must have had solo shows but not yet shown large-scale works in a major museum. Each one gets a double page spread and a short essay explaining what they're about. British names to watch out for include, Phil Collins, Ryan Gander,  Anthony McCall, Momus, Eva Rothschild, Tino Sehgal, Doron Solomons and Donald Urquhart.

Ice Cream is out at the end of the month, packaged in a spectacular blue-silver hardback which shimmers and costs £39.95. Worried about the price? Well, we've got one to give away - we'll mail it to the first person to send us a half decent consumer tip which leads to a post on this blog. Get hacking!

New site 'sifts' good products from bad

Let me declare an interest here, the mother of my children owns a chunk of this site. But if you don't want to pay a subscription to Which? magazine or similar and don't trust user-generated product reviews, then try ProductSifter.com, a new website that uses specialist consumer journalists from around the world to 'sift' good products from bad. The site (motto: we hunt down the best so you don't have to) is free to use and covers everything from digital cameras to surfboards to London restaurants. In each case, the journo writing the review picks the best five options in each area so you don't have to spend hours trawling the web to do the same.

"Why trust our judgement?", asks ProductSifter on its home page. "Because ....

Bad Week for Veggies

It's not been a good week for vegetarians. First it was announced that Mars bars are to have the animal product rennet added to the mix, then it transpires that loads of other apparently veggie-safe foods are also contaminated with animal bits and bobs. The Guardian has put together a great list of nine products to avoid. Here are the highlights:

* Kellogg's Frosted Wheats - unless you want a beefy breakfast avoid these as they contain gelatine

* Tango Orange - not bad on the mammalian front but watch out for the fish gelatine

* Sacla Classic Pesto - chock full of Parmesan which in turn contains rennet made from calves' stomachs

* Guinness - lots of Isinglass, a form of collagen which hails from the swim bladders of fish apparently

* Muller Light yoghurts - yet more yummy gelatine

* Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce - contains anchovies

* Smarties - contains E120 cochineal "produced by extracting the red body material from pregnant scale insects of the species Dactilopius coccus", says the Guardian

* Snickers - more rennet

* Bovril - went veggie a year ago but is now back on the beef extract

And that's all for now folks. I'm off home stopping only very briefly to pick up a nice big kebab.   

Does Bank Charges Loss Mean Anything?

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

According to a report on BBC News a district judge has ruled against allowing someone to reclaim bank charges.   As discussed here before, the campaign to reclaim charges is something I've been heavily involve in, in fact this morning I put out a press release that over 3,000,000 template letters have now been downloaded from my bank charges reclaiming guide.

This result was a bit of a shock, but there’s no cause for panic. This is not a precedent setting case (in other words no other court has to look at this decision and follow it). Across the country the banks are still paying out many tens of thousands a day see bank charges success reports.

My strong suspicion is ....

Starbucks Latest TV Advert (Not)

Satire, irony or just very bad taste? I'm not sure but it raises some important questions and is certain to spark debate. Take a look and let us know what you think...

Should I recycle the waste from carbon off-setting?

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

I'm off on holiday for a week.  As part of my new, slightly greener lifestyle, I now carbon off-set when I fly; after-all, as I'm using the right methods to get the flight as cheaply as possible I am prepared to do a little towards the environment.  Of course, I'm aware carbon offsetting doesn't really wipe out the damage done, but it is a step in the right direction and as I've also now eschewed UK flights for filming over the last year instead of the train, I'm at least trying.

This time round, I went through the list of companies offering the service, which I list in my Cheap Flights article to find ....

New Study Shows Food is Getting Sweeter

FOOD companies have doubled the amount of sugar they add to some of their most popular products — including soups and cereals — according to an excellent article by my colleague Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas in tomorrow's Sunday Times.

"Some of the biggest increases in sugar have been in breakfast cereals, and even wholemeal bread has become far sweeter", he reports. "It now routinely contains nearly a teaspoonful of sugar in every three slices."

Experts warn that ....

Five Books Jane Austen definitely did not write

Ahhh! Another day, another bloody Jane Austen adaptation! The woman snuffed it 200 years ago but still there is no escaping her mushy, cocooned take on Regency Britain. Not only do my partner and au pair seem to have the TV permanently tuned into the latest Austen tosh but last night they left me with the kids to go and see Becoming Jane (left), a Hollywood biopic on the woman. Anyway, out of spite and bitterness, here's a list of five novels Jane Austen definitely did not write. Feel free to write in with a few of your own...

1/ American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (below)
2/ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
3/Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh 
4/ The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
5/ Les 120 Journées de Sodome by the Marquis de Sade

Object of Desire No5

If you are one of those people who, like me, occasionally think about upgrading their happy snapper only to be put off by the complexity and bulk of proper SLR cameras, think again. The new generation of digital SLR cameras is family friendly in terms of not only of size and ease of use but also in terms of price. According to this excellent review and buyers guide by Natalie Hitchins of What Digital Camera, the super compact Olympus E-400 (pictured) is best for families, coming as it does with two lenses. The Canon EOS 400D is best for entry-level users. Both great objects of desire....

Gain £100 from your old mortgage lender in a phone call.

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

I saw a welcome stampede to get cashback from mortgage lenders last week. Normally I don't like having my inbox swamped, yet this was a welcome triumph.  It's all to do with to mortgage exit fees. I did my usual weekly slot on LK-Today (the post 9pm part of GMTV) about the fact that ...

Don't blame the campaigners for the end of free banking

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

I'm rather amused to read today the "bank charges reclaiming may be the end of free banking" story flooding the press.  It does feel a bit like the "we've been pushing this positively for some time, so now let’s have a negative version" reaction.   Obviously as 2.8 million template letters have been downloaded from my bank charges reclaiming article, I take this a bit personally. So let me run you through the facts.

1. The OFT has made an announcement.  The OFT has said it thinks 'free banking' isn't transparent and will investigate.  Well done, OFT: I hate the term 'free banking' it should be 'fees-free banking if you're in credit'.  Yet sadly the OFT, even once it investigates, can't rule: all it can do is give its opinion, then take banks to the court. While it could get a ruling against bank charges (as they're unlawful), I'd be surprised if it got one on fees free banking - I can't see the legal issue.

2. Real profit is from lending at 18% and paying 0.1% in savings.  While bank charges are profitable, banks really make their cash from only paying us 0.1% when we're in-credit and lending it back at up to 18% on unsecured debts - a very profitable game.  Bank charges account for £1-2 bn a year it's estimated - yet bank profits are £38 bn and last year the increase alone was £5bn.  And of course no one is demanding an end to bank charges, just saying they're unlawful because they're too big - I'd be happy with a £2-5 charge rather than the current £30ish.

3. Banks don't have to pay bounced cheques....

Q: When is a diamond not forever? A: When it comes in a ring sold by H Samuel

You would have thought that if the diamond dropped out of a new £500 engagement ring and was lost the jeweller who sold it would replace it, right? Wrong. Or at least not if the jeweller in question is H Samuel, one of Britain's biggest jewellery chains.

Kevin Baxter, 35, proposed to Elsa McLaren, 27, on 7 December 2005 and - as is traditional on such occasions - presented her with a beautiful diamond ring he had bought a few weeks earlier from ....

Wobblin' in the Wind

This Dylan-esque little ditty on credit card spending was found on YouTube by the Consumerist. With British consumers in the red like never before - we currently owe a cool £1.3 trillion to the banks - I thought we should play it too. If interest rates jump again next month as expected, I can see it getting to No1 in the charts by Christmas...

Know your Poison

We at Consumer Central like food producers to be up-front about what they put in their muchies and they don't get more transparent than this: a lovely looking biscuit with every ingredient printed right there on the front. Might be difficult with a curry of course but we think others should follow suit... Check this link for the full story (via boing boing).

How the new energy saving light bulbs (CFLs) can mess up your TV

Warning: The new energy efficient light bulbs (CFLs) governments around the world are busy making mandatory can also mess up your TV remote control equipment.

We were tipped off by reader Nick Flynn who, after replacing his regular light bulbs with CFLs two months ago, found that the remote control for his 27in Sony flatscreen television had packed up. Flynn sent his screen to a repair shop, which found nothing wrong but ....

Shame on eBay floggers of 'bank charge letters'

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

My in-box has been inundated with complaints from people who've seen 'template letters to reclaim bank charges' being sold on eBay, all asking if I can do something about it.  Sadly I can't.  While I've no proof, my strong suspicion, and that of my correspondents, is that the sellers didn't draft the templates themselves or do the research involved, but simply copied those freely available from my Bank Charges Reclaiming article and/or other free activist sites.

Part of me wants to cheer: I'm happy reclaiming bank charges has become so mainstream that money hungry profiteers on eBay are actually selling the templates on eBay.  Yet I'm saddened those people consider this is appropriate.   Then again, this is the nature of eBay; I've written many times on the Golden Rules of eBay buying, which importantly includes 'if you're buying information always check via Google that it isn't available elsewhere for free.  I regularly see links to my articles or free site tools like the Flightchecker or Callchecker on there.  Yet what can you do?

Too much choice?

Great piece here by Peter Wilby in the New Statesman raising the idea that the modern political focus on the consumer may, paradoxically, be doing consumers more harm than good. He points to the spread of supermarkets and the carnage they are reeking on small independent stores as a prime example.

He says: "Paradoxically, this has happened because ...

Never take a 0% credit card out of your wallet

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

The nastiest trick that credit card companies play sounds dull; it’s called the 'order of repayments'. Yet it can cost you thousands. It works like this: you transfer your existing credit card debt to a new card that charges 0% for a year. So far, so good. If you spend on that new card you will be charged at the standard 18% rate on the new money borrowed. Not great, but fair enough, you might think.

But think again. If you now try and pay off the debt on the card you'll soon discover that all your repayments automatically go towards paying off the original debt charged at 0%. This means the expensive new debt - that charged at 18% - is effectively trapped accruing interest. You will be unable to pay it off until you've cleared all the cheap debt - which can take years. This can add hundreds, perhaps thousands of pounds to your final bill, negating the point of re-financing through a 0% card in the first place.   

I've been warning about this for years (see Best Balance Transfers) and now, the Department for Trade and Industry has...

Object of Desire No4

Today I shall be mostly eating taramasalata.... but not just any taramasalata. No, the tub on my desk is Waitrose Taramasalata Supreme and - as every taramasalata aficionado knows - it's the only taramasalata worth eating other than that your Greek gran makes at home. Waitrose does sell the disgusting florescent pink taramasalata stocked by most other shops and supermarkets (for which its buyers should be given a stiff kicking) but it redeems itself with its Taramasalata Supreme. It's not pink, it contains lots of cods row and you will love it. It's a truly worthy object of desire...

Miliband and Brown in light bulb standoff

Blimey. Relations between chancellor Brown and environment minister David Microband (sic) are worse than I thought. No sooner does this world renowned blog stick up a post suggesting Gordon may be on to something with energy saving light bulbs than David sends out a climate pledge card claiming ...

Save the planet and see at the same time

Our beloved chancellor and prime minister in waiting Gordon Brown recently decreed that he is to ban conventional light bulbs in a bid to get our carbon emissions down. It reminded me of Norma Major, wife of John, once urging us all to freeze our leftover scraps of cheese for a rainy day, but then again one shouldn't knock other peoples ideas just because they seem a bit mundane.

Anyway, anyone about to swap light bulbs should check out this excellent review at popularmechanics which ....