You’ve just had a baby. Life is upside down, but in a good way. A couple of months in, you are talking to your antenatal group and someone mentions child benefit. It’s not something you’d have thought you’d be eligible for, as you and your partner earn too much to get any benefits, as a
At some point in the last ten years, since the financial crisis (for that life-changing decade is an anniversary we are approaching), a change in perspective occurred: we went from seeing unsecured debt as something that is undesirable but occasionally necessary to something that is both unavoidable and normal. Credit cards and loans, once something
London has historically been the place to go for young creative types. These days, renting damp warehouses and staying in bad relationships just because being in a couple makes life cheaper are among the many grim choices some make just to be there. But they wouldn’t have it any other way. The thought of settling
On the one hand, perhaps he should only be thinking about football, Minecraft, his Lego Millennium Falcon and whether he is actually capable of magic. On the other, I can’t let this window of opportunity go by. Being five-years-old is a prime time for learning about the world and how things work. It might seem
At some point a few years ago, after the financial crisis had passed but the economic stats still showed the effects, while wandering down the posh bit of my local high street where all the top-end furniture retailers, Italian delis and estate agents reside, I suddenly got it. I noticed that the ones carrying the
If conspiracy theorists turned their attention to the economy rather than, I don’t know, aliens or Hillary Clinton, surely it would not take long for them to notice the peculiar rise in the tax take from VAT. VAT sounds innocuous enough, perhaps because no one really knows why it is there or what ‘Value Added’
Scepticism has a solid place in the history of British philosophical enquiry. Back in the 18th century, empiricists such as David Hume dedicated their lives to the importance of suspending belief in things for which there is insufficient evidence through experience. On the whole, it’s a tradition our culture has maintained. Scepticism rears up in daily
I’m not a car-hater. Somehow, I’ve got two of them. I love driving. It’s fun, it’s powerful, it’s one of the best things about being born in the 20th century. But it’s getting seriously expensive. Cars are moneypits, that we all know. Buying one is often an exercise in trying to guess which will cost
How much do you know about your spouse? Hair colour, date of birth, where they grew up, what they do for a living…how much they earn, perhaps? Not so much that last one, according to a number of respondents to a popular thread on Mumsnet last week. The proportion of respondents who do not know how
The country is divided in many ways. High up on this list of divisions, perhaps even in the top five, is the one between people who have bought the property they live in, and those who rent it. This gap is wider and growing at a faster rate than you would guess. The average deposit
You don’t have to be an economist to know that if you spend more than you earn, you’re in trouble. As Micawber famously said in David Copperfield: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.’
The biggest cultural shifts happen invisibly, bubbling away below the surface for years before someone notices a change. So it was the acceptability of moustaches and gluten-free diets. And so it is with an understanding that we will be working until we die. There was once a time when the goal of any aspirational worker
Every time George Osborne takes hold of a red box he seems to come up with another tax-free savings vehicle. Or so it appears to Individual Savings Account (ISA) savers, who two years ago had two straightforward choices: cash or stocks and shares. Cash for the risk averse, stocks and shares for the risk aware.
There’s a whole swathe of wannabe parents buying pets to ‘practise on’, according to recent research. More than two million British dog owners bought their dogs to limber up for a baby, the Direct Line survey found. Meanwhile, a third of dog owners without children feel like parents and one in 20 childless dog owners
