🔔 💬 Anna's two pence worth (#1): Protect your savings

Anna Bowes is a regular contributor to the BBC’s Money Box, Breakfast and News programs, as well as the national press, providing expert analysis and commentary on the UK savings market. Anna has worked in the financial services industry for more than 20 years and for most of that time has been helping people to make the most of their savings.

As this week’s press summary reiterates, every week we read about Equity Release. It is a huge growing market given the wealth that people now hold in family homes. But for every popular, reputable provider there are opportunistic firms and unscrupulous lenders.

Those of you who potentially want to use the value of your house now for various reasons, rather than dipping into your cash savings, regularly ask us "where is the best place to turn?" as well as "is the market safe?"

As cash savings experts, we can’t answer these questions directly, but as you know, we try to make sure we can help every reader.

This week, Responsible Equity Release, one of the market leaders in the industry, has written an article – Your financial future – just how secure is equity release? – to help alleviate some concerns and simply highlight some options for those of you that are interested.

As expected, this week saw all nine members of the Monetary Policy Committee vote to keep the Bank of England base rate at 0.75%.

And while we might expect to see another smattering of rate increases to take effect on 1st October, things have definitely quietened down – a very disappointing overall result for savers.

Our Ask Anna this week is from someone who is understandably a bit baffled about the role the Bank of England base rate has to play in the savings market.

Cash ISAs have not been immune to the lack of rate increases either – as our article The State of the cash ISA market explains. Research that we carried out for The Mail on Sunday looks back at the last two base rate rises and highlights those providers who have been fair and those who have most definitely not been!

While the number of rate changes to existing savings accounts has quietened down this week, activity in the best buy tables has been rife. Take a look at the Rates Rundown and our Best Buy tables for all the news.

Finally, Bank of Cyprus UK (BOC) has confirmed that an agreement for its sale has been reached, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

This won’t affect the terms and conditions of any accounts that are held with BOC UK, so there is nothing to be concerned about, but for more information take a look at our summary of the situation so far.

Articles featured in this edition