Consumer Central - Times Online - WBLG

Premium Bonds. Calculate your odds.

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

Recently I was beaten by a maths equation.  Not fun for a numbers nerd like me, until I realised it was a calculation so difficult it’d take some serious IQ power.  In the end to defeat it I recruited a post doctoral cosmology statistician; and on the back am very pleased to have developed the first ever Premium Bond Calculator that actually works out your odds of winning.

Accurately cracking this conundrum been a pet peave of mine for a while.  In the past I’d written an article with a basic assessment Premium Bonds: Are they worth it; yet to give a legitimate answer to a question such as “if you’ve £2500 in a premium bonds, what are the chances of beating a top savings accounts returns over a year” takes a lot more. 

Once the algorithm was written, using whats called ‘multinomial probability’; each time the probability distribution changes, it takes a powerful computer 14 hours to rework the answers.  Still sometimes the fun is just in knowing.   

Oh and the answer is you’ve only a 24% chance of beating the saving account with £2,500 in, if you’re a basic rate taxpayer.

Free £60 Sony Walkman mp3 player, but go quick

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

Free £60 Sony Walkman mp3 player, but go quick No scam its true. Apply for a Sony Pulsecard via some websites and you get 11,000 pulsebeat points, this is then enough to get one of Sony's sexy mp3 Walkmen worth £60 (and that's not a list price, its the price you'd actually have to pay to buy it). To get the points all you need do is 'spend on the card', but as spending isn't defined this means you can just go into a supermarket, by an apple or a pack of sweets and bish-bash-bosh you're done!

However this deal is rumoured to be ending very soon probably Tuesday (or it may shift to other websites). I keep track of all available current credit card freebies on my

Don't Kill the goose that laid the golden egg

Much hysteria this week over Google and the information it holds on us.

It's true that if search is to become ever more bespoke, Google and others like it will have to carry on building their databanks. It's a tension that could define the information age: a growing thirst for highly personalised or relevant knowledge on the one hand and concern about privacy on the other.

But images of Google as Big Brother are over-blown. No company in history has ever given consumers so much for so little. Gmail, Analytics, Blogger, Documents, Maps ... the list is long, full of innovation and growing every day. What's more, it's all free. 

More important, perhaps, Google is also changing the corporate ethos. The "greed is good" culture of the 1980s and 1990s has given way to a new altruism - in Google's case a desire to better organise the world's information.

Of course in the long term it could all go tits up. Google could fall into the wrong corporate hands (there are many) or America could go the way of dozens of democracies before it and become a police state. But that's a different proposition entirely and not one that should stop the company in its current, largely benign, incarnation pursing the ultimate in search.

For the moment at least, it seems to me that Google remains a force for consumer good.   

Does Bank Charges Loss Mean Anything?

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

According to a report on BBC News a district judge has ruled against allowing someone to reclaim bank charges.   As discussed here before, the campaign to reclaim charges is something I've been heavily involve in, in fact this morning I put out a press release that over 3,000,000 template letters have now been downloaded from my bank charges reclaiming guide.

This result was a bit of a shock, but there’s no cause for panic. This is not a precedent setting case (in other words no other court has to look at this decision and follow it). Across the country the banks are still paying out many tens of thousands a day see bank charges success reports.

My strong suspicion is ....

Should I recycle the waste from carbon off-setting?

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

I'm off on holiday for a week.  As part of my new, slightly greener lifestyle, I now carbon off-set when I fly; after-all, as I'm using the right methods to get the flight as cheaply as possible I am prepared to do a little towards the environment.  Of course, I'm aware carbon offsetting doesn't really wipe out the damage done, but it is a step in the right direction and as I've also now eschewed UK flights for filming over the last year instead of the train, I'm at least trying.

This time round, I went through the list of companies offering the service, which I list in my Cheap Flights article to find ....

Q: When is a diamond not forever? A: When it comes in a ring sold by H Samuel

You would have thought that if the diamond dropped out of a new £500 engagement ring and was lost the jeweller who sold it would replace it, right? Wrong. Or at least not if the jeweller in question is H Samuel, one of Britain's biggest jewellery chains.

Kevin Baxter, 35, proposed to Elsa McLaren, 27, on 7 December 2005 and - as is traditional on such occasions - presented her with a beautiful diamond ring he had bought a few weeks earlier from ....

Too much choice?

Great piece here by Peter Wilby in the New Statesman raising the idea that the modern political focus on the consumer may, paradoxically, be doing consumers more harm than good. He points to the spread of supermarkets and the carnage they are reeking on small independent stores as a prime example.

He says: "Paradoxically, this has happened because ...

Planned Obsolescence (can you crack the holy grail of consumer scoops?)

Ahhhh! Our vacuum cleaner has broken down again. Sorry, correction: the third vacuum cleaner I have bought in the last 10 years has just packed in. It was a Meile. Before that we had two Dysons whose motors burnt out. We then got a Henry - which everyone said would go on forever - but ours died, age three and a bit. It joined at least three Nuki family washing machines, two dishwashers and a tumble drier in that great electrical scrap-heap in the sky. Each of these was just a few months over five.

A run of bad luck? I'm not convinced. I've long suspected electrical manufactures connive with insurers to build obsolescence into household goods but ....

Bank Charges Ruling Delayed

Martin Lewis, moneysavingexpert.com.

The OFT has delayed giving its opinion on whether it is legal or not for the high street banks to whack consumers who slip only a few pence into the red with penalty charges of up to £30 or more. Instead it's going to mount a full investigation (read Paul's earlier post for an explanation of the issue).

Now, let me declare an interest before I spout forth on this: I'm one of the guys behind the reclaim the charges campaign. No fewer than 2,150,000 free template letters have already been downloaded from the bank charges article on my site, so I'm party pre.  Yet in the interviews ...

Reach for the Skies (not excuses)

Oh, I do love it when big corporations start citing the national interest in order to get their way. And no British company does it better than BA. Whenever it's in trouble (think Concords with doggy fuel tanks, price fixing enquiries, striking caterers...) it's always someone else's fault. And unless the company gets its way, it's not just the airline but the whole of Britain and most of the known universe that will go up in smoke, we are inevitably informed.

And so it has been with the "open skies" negotiations, a new deal between Europe and America which means that real competition will soon be injected into the transatlantic air travel for the first time. From 30 March next year, any airline will be able to carry passengers between Heathrow and America, breaking an impasse, which, for nearly 30 years, has allowed just four carriers (currently: BA, Virgin, American and United) to divide the spoils of most transatlantic air travel between them.

The result has been higher prices. As this excellent piece in the Belfast Telegraph shows, a typical business-class return between Heathrow and JFK currently costs around £4,000. Compare that with flying from Heathrow to Bangkok, where Qantas and Eva Air compete with the “home teams” of BA and Thai Air and you'll find the Club World fare is some £200 less for a journey that is nearly twice as far.

So what has BA had to say on the open skies deal?  Well, a couple of weeks before the deal was done, BA chairman, Martin Broughton, said it was "lousy agreement" which was of "fundamental importance to BA and the UK economy". It would do nothing positive for you and me but would "bolster US interests" over our own. It should be dropped, he said.

And after the government decided that BA was crying wolf and signed up to the deal, what did BA have to say then?  How badly would BA and Britain be effected? The answer came this time from BA chief executive Willie Walsh who was a tad shorter and more muted than his chairman. The company (and presumably the country) would "not be impacted at all", he said.