Pricewatch »

• Payment protection insurance. Can you get a refund?

  July 9, 2012 @ 11:31 am | by Conor Pope

  There have been more than 340,000 payment protection insurance policies sold in Ireland over the last five years.

  Many of these policies will have been mis-sold to people.

  Common reasons why you may have been mis-sold a PPI policy include

  If uou are under 18 or over 65
  If you work less than 16 hours a week
  If you are self-employed or unemployed
  If you have pre-existing medical conditions
  If you are on contract or temporary work
  If you were told that taking such a policy out would help you get the loan approved.

  If you think you have been mis-sold a payment protection insurance policy, you should take the following steps:

  First and most obviously find out if you have a PPI policy. Check your statements to see if there are any deductions that you can’t explain. It may not be listed separately so it is also worth ringing your lender to ask.
  If you have one you will need to write to your lender asking for the following documents:
  A signed copy of any consent or application form
  A copy of all fact-find completed by the salesperson and all the contemporaneous file notes they may have taken at the time.
  Ask what the cost of the policy is and what total you have paid to date
  Ask for a copy of the PPI policy document you were sold and any explanatory notes

  Address the letter to the compliance officer reporting to the Central Bank.

  If a lender refuses your request for a refund the next step is to lodge a complaint with the Financial Services Ombudsman for arbitration.
  Financial Ombudsman’s Bureau
  3rd Floor
  Lincoln House
  Lincoln Place
  Dublin 2
  Lo-call 1890 882 090
  Tel: 01 662 0899
  Fax: 01 662 0890
  Email: enquiries@financialombudsman.ie

• Our banks are broken on almost every level

  February 17, 2012 @ 10:06 am | by Conor Pope

  I was contacted recently by a reader who had a story which, I think, reflects the rotten state of the Irish personal banking sector. She has been with National Irish Bank for 20 years, has never had an unauthorised overdraft, defaulted on a loan, run up a massive credit card debt or behaved in any kind of financially reckless fashion. All her wages go directly into this account every month and have done since the early 1990s.

  She is, in short, a very good customer.
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• Sky high saving…

  February 16, 2012 @ 5:47 pm | by Conor Pope

  I was contacted a couple of hours ago by a SKY customer who wants to get rid of her eircom landline but is afraid that if she does she will lose her TV signal. I actually thought she might be right but Twitter tells me no. While you do need a phone line for Sky multi-room, you don’t if you just want a single box. Not having a landline means she won’t be able to access some of the interactive features on Sky but everything else should work as normal. Given that she is paying 40 quid a month for a telephone service she never uses and is in her mid-20s, by the time she hits 80, she will have saved herself more than €25,000 by simply cancelling the landline.

• Is Greyhound the worst service provider in Ireland?

  @ 11:06 am | by Conor Pope

  Several weeks ago Greyhound came uninvited into my life. The relationship, so far, has not been problem free.
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• Where has all the old money gone?

  February 10, 2012 @ 1:34 pm | by Conor Pope

  Irish consumers who are strapped for cash might want to look behind sofas and rifle through the pockets of little-worn suits in search of some of the €361m worth of punts that were never exchanged for euro after the old currency ceased to be legal tender a decade ago.
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• The best sites for clickmas

  November 14, 2011 @ 10:54 am | by Conor Pope

  ’TIS THE season to be clever and the cleverest people will be doing at least some, if not all, of their Christmas shopping online. But with hundreds of thousands of websites touting for business and just a handful of big players hoovering up most of that business, it can be hard to find your way to the best, most unusual and best-value gifts.

  Last week, we asked readers to recommend the sites they favoured and they came back with dozens of suggestions, some of which we had heard about and others which are soon to become the first port of call for all our Christmas shopping needs.

  And before you say it, we do know that there are 41 sleeps until the big day and that Pricewatch is frequently to be found railing against the early-onset of good cheer but when it comes to shopping online, it is important to get it over with early.

  While many Irish sites – and some international ones – have a very quick turnaround and can deliver to you within days of buying, the simplest thing is to shop early so you don’t spend Christmas week fretting and sweating about all those gifts which have yet to arrive. Inevitably the big players in e-tailing such as amazon.com, play.com and even ebay.com are going to be popular again with Irish shoppers over the coming weeks, but for the truly original present, you may need to cast your net wider.
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• Governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.

  September 27, 2011 @ 10:36 am | by Conor Pope

  

  This interview was carried on the BBC yesterday and in less than 24 hours has been watched by a quarter of a million people. It is jaw-dropping and terrifying and makes me want to reach into the computer, drag the trader out by his, no doubt, hideously expensive tie, and punch him in the face over and over and over again. Now, maybe he is right, maybe Goldman Sachs (and all the other funds) do rule the world and are set on destroying the lives of milions of people so they can make even more money but surely a huge tax on traders’ profits introduced across the world immediately would soften their cough and restore the balance between the markets and the State? It’s not going to happen, however… And in any event, if this guy is right and the savings of millions of people are set to be wiped out in less than 12 months, it is probably too late to act now.

• News evokes sadness but not surprise

  July 19, 2011 @ 4:56 pm | by Conor Pope

  THE NEWS that the receivers have been called in to Superquinn will be greeted with shock and sadness by many Irish people who have held an affection for the retailer almost since the moment the ebullient Feargal Quinn opened the doors of his first shop in Dundalk in 1960.
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• How to get rid of an impossible mortgage

  @ 4:55 pm | by Conor Pope

  THE BANKS ARE coming down hard on people who do not repay their loans, but some experts say many of those loans should never have been given in the first place. This means that ultimately the banks will have no choice but to forgive the debt, although they are unlikely to admit that they are doing so.
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• Go the f*ck to sleep!

  May 18, 2011 @ 8:44 am | by Conor Pope

  This might just be my favourite thing. Ever. This, um children’s book, has reached number one on Amazon’s bestseller charts this week even though it won’t be published for another month. And it’s not hard to see why. It may be a little (okay a lot) profane for a bedtime read, but any parent will be able to relate to ‘Go the Fuck to Sleep’, an illustrated plea to a trying infant who is using all the weapons in their arsenal to avoid going to sleep. A bootleg PDF version of the book has been in circulation for months now and has gone completely viral – the authors of the book are unlikely to be overly concerned about the PDF books s there have been over 100,000 pre-orders made already. The good people at storyful have the full story…

• I made a mistake…

  April 5, 2011 @ 12:38 pm | by Conor Pope

  I am constantly trotting out the maxim that if something seems too good to be true then it is too good to be true. Well, I should have paid more attention to it when writing the article on how to cut the cost of your mortgage which appeared in The Irish Times yesterday. In that article I said that by paying a mortgage twice a month instead of once a month, more than €50,000 could be be knocked off a €300,000 mortgage over the course of a 30-year term. I said the savings would come at no additional or immediate cost to the mortgage holder.

  This was wrong.

  I could explain how the mistake happened but that’s largely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that the article appeared under my name so I take full responsibility for it and apologise to anyone whose hopes I raised that such savings could be made without any cost to themselves.

  The savings outlined only accrue when a person pays 26 fortnightly payments as opposed to 12 monthly ones. If you make 12 monthly payments of €1000 you pay €12,000 a year but if you make 26 fortnightly payments of €500 you pay €13000 which equals an extra month’s payment each year. This comes off the capital and reduces the term of the mortgage. While some savings can be made by simply splitting payments from once a month to twice a month, they are small as the mortgage holder is not paying off the capital any faster.

  To add further to the confusion, the banks I spoke to last week said that twice monthly (or fortnightly) payments were possible yet when people contacted them on the back of my article they were told that they were not. Many of the banks say they will still facilliate fortnightly payments but some are now saying that they will not… They say they can do such a thing on an isolated case-by-case basis but if the practice was to become widespread it would upset their systems.

  There are very real savings that can be made by paying a mortgage once every fortnight and it is a pity that some Irish banks have decided that they can not facilitate it.

  But, this post is not about the banks. It is about my mistake. Again, I am sorry. And mortified.

• The ad that never was…

  March 22, 2011 @ 9:53 am | by Conor Pope

  
  This is the Nike ad that supposedly celebrates England winning the Grand Slam in Dublin on Saturday. The only problem is that England did not actually win the Grand Slam in Dublin on Saturday. The orignal youtube video I linked to via Twitter yesterday has been removed – by who, I have no idea – and this one might well get removed too. I would love to know how this ad go out…

• Cheap flights

  @ 9:45 am | by Conor Pope

  

  How am I only seeing this now? More than a million other people got there before me, for shame.

• Some country for old men

  March 9, 2011 @ 10:30 am | by Conor Pope

  Yeats may have got it all wrong: a study to be published today suggests that this might be a country for old men – and women – after all.

  Most respondents to the survey of the over-50s (and yes, I know that that does not make you old) claim to be happy, relatively affluent and upbeat about their personal futures while more than two-thirds say the recession has not had a major impact on their lives.
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• Lecky prices set to fall after ruling

  March 5, 2011 @ 12:56 pm | by Conor Pope

  Some rare good news for consumers today. The ESB could reduce electricity prices by as much as 10 per cent within weeks following a decision of the energy sector regulator to open up fully the domestic electricity market early next month.
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• Buddy can you spare €800 a month?

  @ 11:54 am | by Conor Pope

  How easy would it be for you to find an additional €800 a month just to keep a roof over your head? Most people, already hit by a double whammy of pay cuts and tax increases in recent months, would struggle to cobble together the cash. But with the European Central Bank (ECB) giving its clearest signal yet that a sustained round of interest-rate hikes is looming, more than 500,000 mortgage holders may have no choice but to find it somewhere.
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• Give your wallet a break on holiday

  @ 8:45 am | by Conor Pope

  

  From trawling the internet for flights and apartments to skipping dessert and splashing out on secret deals, here’s 10 ways to spend less on holiday
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• Best thing ever.

  March 1, 2011 @ 2:13 pm | by Conor Pope

  

  Right, I know that this clip has nothing to do with prices or the like but it has brightened up my day no end so it would be wrong not to share!

• I’m loving it…

  @ 10:11 am | by Conor Pope

  

  I wrote a piece a couple of weeks back about a move among some restaurants to include nutritional information about the food they serve on their menus.
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• Eh, there must be some mistake…

  @ 12:01 am | by Conor Pope

  Dear Pricewatch blog.

  I know that we have grown apart these last few months but despite that, we appear to have made it on to the (long) shortlist in a category for the Irish Blog Awards. While I am obviously honoured to be on the list in the company of some very fine journalists – as should you be – it has made me feel bad. I have been neglecting you for some time, I can’t deny it. It’s not you, though, it’s me. I had my head turned by the harlot that is Twitter. But I can change. I know I can. And we can get back what we once had, surely? From now on I will be more attentive. I promise… I won’t let you down again ***

  *** I might actually let you down again.

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