If you were thinking of taking action to reclaim your bank charges, don’t be put off by the news that a district judge at Birmingham County Court has ruled against a Lloyds TSB customer who was trying to do just that.

This is just one case that’s gone in favour of the banks, and a county court decision doesn’t set a precedent in the way a High Court decision would.

Thousands of people have already reclaimed millions of pounds in unfair charges, and many more will follow.

Several websites, including Which?, have pages explaining the procedure. So go on and stake your claim.

I received the following email today and thought it might be worth sharing the answer with a wider audience�

‘I know that children are allowed to earn �100 interest on saving per annum, but amounts in excess of this contribute to the parents taxable income. What is the position if the savings were gifted by a grandparent, please’�

You’re getting a couple of things slightly confused: children’s tax allowances and the amount of interest they can earn on gifts from parents.

The under-16s have the same tax allowances as adults, which means they can earn up to £5,225 this tax year (April 6 to April 5 next year) before they’re liable for income or savings tax.

To ensure they don’t have 20 per cent savings tax deducted from the interest (below this threshold) that they make on their cash, you need to fill in an R85 form for each account they hold. You can download it here.

As a parent, you can also claim back, on their behalf, any tax they’ve been wrongly charged on earnings, using an R40 form (download here).

Also as a parent (or step-parent), you can give them - or invest on their behalf - as much money as you like.

But if the cash from each parent earns more than £100 interest a year, it will be taxed as if it was yours, not theirs.

If the Revenue didn’t do this, parents could off-load their cash onto their kids as a way of avoiding tax.

Grandparents and other adults (who are obviously considered to be above such dirty tricks) can give them any amount of money without tax liability. But if it earns enough interest to breach the tax threshold, the child will have to pay 20 per cent savings tax on it.

There are all sorts of accounts aimed at children, or adults saving on their behalf, so make sure you shop around to find the best possible interest rate.

Nearly half of all homeowners are paying way over the odds for their buildings, contents and life cover because they choose their mortgage lender’s insurance.

The Post Office says more than eight million people are throwing away a combined total of £40 million every year because they buy their lender’s products instead of shopping around.

One in 10 do so because they think (wrongly) that it’s compulsory to buy home or life cover from mortgage provider, and one in 20 actually believe they might not get the mortgage they want if they don’t buy insurance too (wrong again).

But most people say they stick with their lender simply because it’s ‘convenient’.

£40 million is a high price pay for convenience, don’t you think?

Halifax is launching what it describes as a ‘new look’ One credit card.

It charges no interest on balance transfers and purchases for nine months, and has a typical long-term interest rate of 13.9 per cent.

Look good to you?

Its attraction may fade a bit when I tell you that the old Halifax One card, which it replaces, also offered nine months interest free on transfers and purchases, but had a typical standard rate of just 9.9 per cent.

Halifax has added the sweetener of a further six months interest free for new transfers made ‘from the start of the calendar month following the first year anniversary of the card’.

And who exactly is going to take advantage of this part of the offer?

Borrowers who think it’s worth leaving a balance clocking up interest elsewhere until they can transfer it to their Halifax One card on its first anniversary, when they could move it now and stop paying interest altogether?

Or those who think it’s a good idea to spend the year making purchases on another interest-charging card, just so they can transfer them later, when they could make them interest free with Halifax?

I sincerely hope not.

The only circumstance in which it would be worth taking up phase two of the Halifax One offer is if you have a second zero per cent card with a balance that needs transferred off in a year’s time to avoid the start of interest charges.

So there you have it: a new look card that looks pretty much like the old one - apart from the addition of an offer that will benefit few people, and a long-term interest rate 40 per cent higher than the old one.

Ken Stannard, Halifax’s head of credit cards, says excitedly: ‘This is yet another high-street banking first from the Halifax.’

Yes, indeed.

If you really need another credit card, you can do better. If you don’t believe me, you can seach the latest credit card best buys here

Most of us would rather talk about sex than money, according to Scottish Widows.

It says two out of three of us don’t tell our families how much we get paid.

And more than a third of us don’t know exactly how much our partner earns.

Which sounds like a recipe for financial disaster to me – so get talking before it’s too late.

It was a black day today for the six million-plus UK borrowers with a variable rate mortgage, as the base lending rate hit its highest level for six years.

The Bank of England’s latest increase means we (myself included) can expect to pay more for the roof over our head from next month.

The 0.25 percentage point hike, to 5.5 per cent, is the fourth since August and will add around £15 a month to a typical £100,000 repayment loan.

And the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon.

Michael Coogan, director general of the Council of Mortgage Lenders, warns, ‘Borrowers must expect rates to remain at or around their current levels for the foreseeable future and plan their finances on that basis.’

Time to consider remortaging to cut your costs?

Hello and welcome to my new personal finance blog.

If you’d like to find out who I am and why I’m writing this blog, please visit the ‘pages’ section of the site to read all about it!

Alex Morgan

While on the subject of mortgages (see previous post on repossessions)�

The Council of Mortgage Lenders says the average first-time buyer now borrows 3.31 times their annual income.

Maybe that doesn’t sound too worrying, but if that’s the average, then half of all first-timers are borrowing more than three-and-a-third times what they earn.

There are more and more reports circulating about lenders offering mortgages of anything from five to nine-times income. (I’m not naming names as I don’t want to encourage you!)

Of course, the lenders will always say they don’t hand out sums of this magnitude to just anyone, that borrowers are carefully vetted and only those on large and reliable salaries get the really big income multiples.

But are they all telling the truth?

An independent financial adviser I was talking to the other day said he was often amazed by just how much mortgage lenders will give first-timers on modest incomes.

If interest rates continue to rise or they get into financial difficulties because they lose their job or partner, fall ill or have a serious accident, they’ll soon be wishing they hadn’t accepted their lender’s ‘generous’ offer.

If you’re thinking of borrowing five or more times your income, follow this link first.

If you have a question about any aspect of personal finance, why not post it here?

It could be about borrowing - ranging from credit cards and personal loans to mortgages - saving, pensions, insurance or anything else money related.

I’m not a financial adviser, so I can’t give you advice.

But what I can do is offer an impartial opinion based on my years as a personal finance writer and editor for papers including Business a.m., Scotland’s Daily Record and Sunday Mail, the Glasgow Herald and the MoneySorter.co.uk group of websites.

I’ll try to offer some suggestions for sources of useful information, and you can see what other visitors to this site think too.

Alex

Could you keep paying your mortgage if you lost your job, split up with your partner or became too ill to work?

The Department for Constitutional Affairs says more than 50 people a day are having their home repossessed by their mortgage lender because they’ve fallen so far behind with their payments.

These aren’t just statistics: they’re real people like you and me, whose lives have been torn apart because they could no longer cope financially.

They probably never expected to get into this kind of mess and certainly never dreamt they’d lose their home.

The hard facts are that for many, three interest rate rises since August have been too much to bear, while you could say others have just been unlucky.

And things are about to get worse, with the Bank of England widely predicted to announce another rise this week.

So should we blame the lenders for handing out too much cash to people who’re already in debt or too irresponsible to keep their heads above water? Or is it the borrowers’ fault for taking the money and not keeping a better grip on their finances?

I reckon both sides are at fault.

You can’t necessarily predict that you’ll end up out of work, with a failed relationship or a serious health problem - or the direction interest rates will take.

But it’s only sensible to build up a savings cushion and to organise insurance to tide you over the bad times.

Because if you get into financial difficulties, you can’t rely on state help to pay your mortgage - as you’ll find out if you click on the link.