🔔 📰 Press Review: Savings Roundup (week commencing 15 September 2018)

The Express summarised the new Help to Buy Scheme that was launched recently. It’s a new government incentive to encourage lower earners to put something aside, by offering a 50% bonus on savings of up to £50 per month. The bonus will be paid after two years, and then after another two years to try an encourage those who qualify to get into the savings habit. The obvious issue is that low income earners will really struggle to find funds to save, regardless of how generous the bonus incentive is. However, there has been a trial running for the last eight months and apparently 45,000 people have managed to save on average £66 over that time, which is a good start.

The Mail on Sunday followed up their previous weeks exposé on the cash ISA market – only M&S Bank has raised the rate on its ISA since then – increasing the Advantage Cash ISA option by 0.10% to 0.85%. The article highlighted that 13 cash ISA providers, including Santander, have still failed to pass on either of the last two base rate rises to some of their customers. Shocking.

The Times ran an article about Cash Savings Platforms, as Hargreaves Lansdown has launched its Active Savings facility. The article focused on Octopus Cash, which was one of the first to launch, Hargreaves Lansdown and Raisin UK. Octopus was quoted as saying that it has had its best ever month as the high street banks’ reluctance to pass on the base rate rise to their savers has driven a record number of people to sign up.

There was also a really interesting article in the FT last Saturday, about how important it is to make a financial plan – it’s not sensible to just save willy-nilly as you might not achieve the goals you need to. That makes a lot of sense to me as until I did exactly that recently, I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to able to afford to retire in the way I hope to.

There were also still a number of articles which are reviewing the fallout of the collapse of Lehman Brothers a decade ago and whether we have actually learned anything following the crisis.