Guides

We’ve been working to make our guides more dynamic, and have converted some of them into easy-to-follow YouTube videos. Here, you can access the video guides along with hyperlinked transcripts that allow you to track the movements we make, page-to-page.

We’re always on the lookout for more ideas, so please let us know if there’s anything you would like us to cover, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Savings Guides (Video)

1. Secure Savings and Compensation

How secure are your savings if your bank goes bust? Find out about the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), how its compensation measures work, and how this works in practice with high-street banks.

This guide cuts through the complexity of merged institutions to show savers how to ensure that all of their savings and deposits are covered if a bank fails.

2. Savings and Bonus Rates

Many savings accounts now include temporary bonus rates. Discover the impact these can have on traditional savings accounts, and how this culture has emerged.

This guide investigates a number of options – from switching annually to calculating stronger standard rates – to help savers maintain stronger returns on their savings accounts and ISAs.

Coming Soon:

3. Savings: Ten Top Tips

This guide offers a number of vital tips to help consumers make the most of their savings at all times.

Featured tips include: how to negotiate the pitfalls of bonus rates; ensuring that tax-free allowances are used; investing into savings products such as fixed-rate bonds and investment plans; and micro-managing savings as efficiently as possible.

4. Transferring Cash ISAs

Given the prevalent culture of bonus rates in top performing savings accounts, it’s all the more important to know how ISA transfers work.

This guide explains the process of organising an ISA transfer, as well as the regulations concerning old and current ISA savings, which are more flexible than many savers often realise.

5. Cash ISAs / Fixed Rate Bonds

Two of the best methods by which savers can make more from their savings is by investing into cash ISAs and fixed-rate bonds.

However, cash ISAs have a limited individual allowance per year, while returns on fixed-rate bonds are taxable. This guide helps you to determine which product offers the best returns.

Savings Guides (Written Only)

Cash ISAs: An Introduction

Every UK saver is entitled to a tax-free savings allowance every year, available in accounts known as ISAs.

This guide highlights the savings that could be made by investing into these accounts. It signifies what to look out for with new ISA products, and notes the options that are available for transferring an ISA to a different provider.

Inflation-Linked Savings

This guide compares the merits of variable-rate inflation-linked savings accounts with the standard fixed-rate bonds and ISAs.

It investigates whether inflation-linked savings always offer the best solutions in the long term, with inflation notoriously tough to predict. It also questions whether there are any safeguards in case of lower inflation.

How to Beat Inflation

This guide investigates some of the few savings options that are available to combat periods of higher inflation. It also addresses the fiendishly difficult task of trying to predict inflation before making potentially long-term decisions.

With unpredictability making decisions all the more difficult for savers, the guide proffers that informed decisions may be the best (and only) response.

Credit Card Guides (Video)

1. Beat My Card!

This guide offers a step-by-step guide to the user-friendly Which4U ‘Beat My Card’ credit card savings calculator.

In just 60 seconds, and with just a few click of a button, this device could help cardholders to save hundreds on their credit cards by listing up to three cards that offer the best potential savings. Check out the guide to find out more!