Money Towers

Chip and pin cards were once heralded as a way to all but eradicate fraud but as we reported before, scammers have found ways to get around the chip and pin security measures and defraud customers once more.

And as chip and pin grows ever more popular, criminal gangs appear to be finding even more ways around the system. Some recent reports have shown that criminals are stealing card-readers from petrol stations and shops around the country, dismantling them, installing their own devices into the readers which can record card numbers and PINs, before reassembling the reader and returning them to a shop. Some of these devices are so sophisticated that there are rumours that they can transmit all the input details to a mobile phone.

Recent research has shown that the average Briton has just 52 days worth of savings – that is, if they were made unemployed today, their savings would only be enough to cover 52 days before the money ran out. Scarily, over a third of people were found to have just 11 days worth of savings. Another recent survey has shown that only around half of Brits are putting aside enough money to give them an adequate income for their retirement years.

Had you invested in oil six months ago, you would have benefited from a staggering 34 percent return on your investment. Everyone seems to be talking about the credit crunch and spiralling fuel prices, so is investing in oil a wise idea?

The price of oil has been on an upward trend for over six years – that’s the longest period of rising prices ever recorded. Despite tiny falls in the usage of oil in the US and the UK in recent times, developing countries are starting to consume more oil, therefore the overall demand is increasing and is expected to remain high for the next few years.

With the cost of gas increasing significantly and industry experts predicting that the cost of the average household bill will increase by a massive 40 percent this year, many are starting to worry about the price of their utility bills and are looking for ways to reduce the amount of energy they use.

Here at MoneyTowers.com, we have put together our Top Five Tips for helping reduce your energy bills and therefore helping you to save money.

Recently, there has been a spate of adverts from many high street banks proclaiming how high their savings rates are. But are these high savings accounts really worth it? The answer is, it depends.

A string of banks have recently advertised their regular savings accounts with fantastic savings rates, however these deals are not always as great as they may seem and it is critical to read the small print associated with the deal before deciding to open up an account.

Once you get into the habit of using a pawn shop, it can be a hard job to kick the habit. Many people can see this, but have no other alternatives to help make ends meet – pawnshops are an easy way of accessing quick cash and, like most things, have both positive and negative aspects associated with them.

So how exactly do they work? It’s actually a pretty straightforward process. A pawnbroker lends a customer a small amount of money in return for some collateral (jewellery, electrical items, mobile phones etc). This collateral normally has a slightly higher resale value than the loan given and acts as a guarantee for the loan. The beauty of using objects as collateral is that no credit checks need to be done.