Retailers should refund customers for faulty goods

Retailers are keen to get us into their sales and seem to have forgotten about the items we paid good money for before Christmas.   Faulty items are a nuisance so are the customers who bought them.  We all need to tough it out.  Yes it is worth taking things back for a refund. A very small example has caused disgruntlement in Money Fight Club Towers.  A pair of cashmere socks bought as a gift were wrapped up by the sales assistant with the security device still attached.   First of all we were annoyed that the retailer thought so little of […]

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Feudal leasehold contracts trap buyers

Two leasehold triumphs today but there is still a long way to go.   Leasehold, a feudal form of tenure unique to England and Wales has been trapping home-buyers for decades with contracts that cost them dear. Today Taylor Wimpey, the builder, has said that it will no longer build new  leasehold houses with ground rents that can double every ten years. These leases have trapped buyers, who have been unable to sell on their properties. Last year 95% of all new properties sold in London were leasehold  and 670,000 of houses were leasehold in England and Wales, including 2,829 new […]

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Beware supermarket vouchers

We are in Advent.  The trees are up and the Christmas shopping lists are made.  And every time we go to a supermarket we get another voucher offering great riches…or not. You need to be wary not to be conned into spending more than you would normally and to understand how little you will get with some of the offers and how many hoops you will have to go through to get any cash at all. And the stores are probably hope that the lure of points will take your eye off the price of the food on the shelves. […]

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Don’t be fooled by energy companies

Don’t be fooled by the apparent generosity of the energy companies that have frozen the price of gas and electricity until at least the end of the winter. Their marketing people are earning their money with their full page advertisements published on the coldest days so far of this winter telling us that they are not putting prices up.   What the ads did not tell us is that the companies bought their gas electricity in the wholesale markets when prices were much cheaper.   And they are only freezing their already very expensive standard variable rates. They are not however freezing […]

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