In the heady days of the property boom securing a mortgage often simply involved a quick hunt online, a phone call and filling in a form.
But with lenders tightening their criteria, demanding bigger deposits and cherry picking the best borrowers, potential homebuyers or remortgagers now need to put in some hard work.
The good news […]
It amounts to a massive admission of failure during the boom years leading up to the credit crunch when previous chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin led the bank to the brink of disaster.
But new boss Stephen Hester warned: ‘There is no alternative.’ >>Chris Blackhurst gives his verdict on Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension
A key […]
The Council of Mortgage Lenders said 40,000 homeowners lost their properties, up from 25,900 in 2007, having fallen behind with their mortgage payments.
The CML reported that around 10,400 properties were taken into possession by first charge mortgage lenders in the final three months of 2008. This was down from 11,100 in the previous quarter […]
Tomorrow is the last day of a three-month consultation carried out by the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform into the use of service charges, tips and cover charges in paying staff.
The department is understood to favour changing legislation so that employers can no longer count tips towards payroll costs.
The department, headed by […]
The loans appear available, but when borrowers apply, they are turned down. Brokers say this is especially true of the few loans available to first-time buyers with small deposits and younger borrowers, which are in practice almost impossible to obtain.
Several banks and building societies, including Abbey, Cheltenham & Gloucester, Halifax, the Post Office, RBS […]
The oil price fell to 2004 levels of less than $45 a barrel but the cost of filling a family car has risen to nearly £50. The average price of petrol reached 90.48p per litre last night while diesel was at 100.74p. The oil price […]
Parent company Stylo said it as ‘disappointed’ to report talks with creditors and landlords aimed at retrieving the stores from administration had failed.
Stylo will be placed into administration as a result.
This week Stylo chief executive Michael Ziff said if the proposals were voted down it would ‘threaten the employment of some 5,400 people’.
PriceLess and […]
Official figures will show that the number of people out of work soared again at the end of last year.
Experts said it was now ‘inevitable’ that the total will reach three million before the economy starts to recover.
Meanwhile, the Jobcentre Plus website is advertising almost 200,000 posts in Europe - many paying paltry wages […]
Simon Moon from This is Money replies: It seems a good number of older people are under the impression they have received a £60 cold weather payment when, in fact, they have not.
The £60 many have received is a one-off addition to the £10 Christmas bonus being sent out between January and March.
This […]
One in four workers say they can no longer afford to call it a day when they had planned because of the recession, which has hammered investment and pension returns, interest rates and property prices.
But the problems faced by those on the verge of retirement today are only a taste of things to come […]
© 2008 Daily Financial News