mortgage at 2.5 per cent, overpaying
£100 a month would save you £9,948 in
interest and you would pay off the mort-
gage three years and four months sooner.
If you were to overpay £300 a month, you
would save £23,099 in interest and pay it
off seven years and ten months early.
Time: ten minutes
Saving: £923 a year (overpaying
£300 a month)SATURDAY: GET OUT OF CASH
It is sensible to have three months of
spending money in a cash account as an
emergency, but you can still earn interest
on that rainy day fund. There are now 15
easy-access accounts paying 1.05 per cent
or more and the best rate is 1.5 per cent
from Chase. If you’re happy to tie money
up for a better rate, returns on one-year
fixed-rate bonds are at their highest for
nine years: Vanquis Bank is paying
2.27 per cent available from Vanquis
Bank.
Any extra cash beyond your emer-
gency fund should work harder for you —
and that means taking some risk. Invest
in a basket of shares through a low-cost
investment platform such as IWeb
(owned by Halifax), Vanguard or Nut-
meg. These offer products that provide
automatic diversification for low fees and
mean you don’t have all your eggs in one
basket. A FTSE 100 tracker, for example,
aims to replicate the returns of the largest
UK firms. Vanguard offers a FTSE 100
tracker for a 0.06 per cent annual charge,
with a platform fee on top. The key is to
keep costs low and invest for the long
term. Historically, the longer you are in,
the greater your return.
Time: 2 hours (to transfer cash
and open a trading account)
Saving: £512 (£400 on £10,000 earn-
ing 4 per cent in a FTSE 100 tracker
and £112 from £7,500 emergency cash
in the best easy access account)TOTAL SAVING:
ABOUT £3,000 A YEARinternet firm you want to quit compared
with how long it takes if you want to
report a problem.)
The pandemic made it worse and
many of them have never recovered. In
some cases it is almost impossible to get
through on the phone.
The situation in the public sector is
more appalling, because the role they
fulfil is so important. We get complaints
all the time about the DVLA, passport
office, probate office, the department
for work and pensions, and many blame
the fact that staff are working from home.
Now, I don’t know if that is true or
not, but there is a correlation. The right
to work from home has become a strand
of the culture wars and like so many of
these modern issues there is no wrong
or right. For some jobs it suits, for others
it does not. I can and do work from
home sometimes, but I don’t like it very
much.
What I do know though is that the
argument will not be won until these
appalling levels of service are fixed,
because while they persist the critics will
continue to say that working from home
is to blame.
And that means we need more
investment in service. We’ve all had
enough of cheapskate firms leaving us
stuck on hold.
@jimconeyM
oney is the great solver of
problems. It’s why we save and
why businesses invest.
When my removals firm
cancelled last year two days
before we were due to move house, we
threw cash at that problem. We ended
up paying 100 per cent more than we
were originally quoted, but the
alternative was to not move, or do it
ourselves. No thank you.
When banks realised that the
pandemic would shut all their branches
and force their service staff to answer
calls from home, they dipped in to their
coffers to solve that problem.
One chief executive regaled me with
how his bank had bought a whole
shipping container of laptops and
phones — outbidding another business —
to ensure that all their staff had access to
the proper equipment. Their tech
experts worked through the night for
days on end to ensure that systems ran
smoothly.
And they did. Most financial services
firms did something similar and so came
out of the pandemic with reputations
not just intact, but substantially
improved. Not only that, but it also
helped banks to win the argument over
branches and working from home. They
proved that in a huge number of cases,
customers didn’t need branches andthat many service staff worked better if
they could be flexible.
We don’t really question how many
bank staff work from home because
service levels are generally pretty good.
We don’t care where someone is based if
they can answer our query promptly.
But then there are broadband firms,
energy suppliers, the public sector and
British Airways. These are sectors and
businesses where customer service has
long been diabolical, largely driven by
chronic underinvestment.
Broadband firms and energy
suppliers for too long had their focus on
acquiring new customers, which meant
that existing ones were deprived of the
service they deserved. ( Just see how
quickly you can get through to anNo one cares where you
work if you do the job right
James Coney
The right to
work from home
has becomepart of the
culture wars
MONEY
Follow us on Twitter @TimesMoney
THE TOWN
THAT SHUT
ITS DOORS ON
FIRST-TIME
BUYERS
PAGES 12-13
The quick and easy way
to save £3,000 in 7 days
SUNDAY: CHILL OUT
Want to shave six per cent off your gas
bill? Reduce the water temperature on
your boiler. This is separate from the tem-
perature you want your rooms to be, and
should be set at about 75 degrees Celsius
for the best efficiency and performance,
according to Vaillant, a manufacturer. In
the summer you can turn it down to
about 65 degrees. That 10 degrees will
save you between 6 and 7 per cent on
your gas bill. If you pay by direct debit,
make sure you are not in too much credit.
If you have been with your supplier for a
year or more, your balance should be
close to zero or negative by now. If it isn’t,
ask for some money back. If you have
only single glazed windows stick on some
simple secondary glazing film sold by
companies like Stormguard or Tesa.
And make sure your fridge is not up
too high.
Time: ten seconds to adjust boiler
Saving: £69 a yearMONDAY: GET SOME FREE MONEY
Chase, JP Morgan’s app-based bank, will
pay you £20 for every new customer your
refer — up to 20 times. The bank also
offers a market-leading rate of 1.5 per
cent on its easy-access savings account.
The wealth manager Interactive Inves-
tor will pay you £200 if you refer a friend
or family member who transfers £10,000
to a cash dealing account or investment.
Your friend will also save a year’s plat-
form fees, worth £120. The energy com-
pany Octopus will give you and a friend
you refer £50 each, and you can do this
an unlimited number of times. Zen Inter-
net customers can get £80 vouchers to
spend at retailers including Amazon,
Argos and John Lewis for each referral,
while your friend gets a £20 voucher. BT
offers £50 Amazon vouchers.
Time: 30 minutes a referral
Saving: up to £780TUESDAY: SHOP BETTER
You can earn cashback by shopping
through websites like TopCashback or
Quidco. It is particularly lucrative if you
buy big-ticket items or change insurance,
phone, TV or broadband contract.
Reward schemes like Nectar at Sains-
bury’s and Tesco Clubcard offer one
point for every £1 spent online and
instore. Every Clubcard point is worth a
penny and every Nectar point 0.5p. Some
goods are cheaper if you have a Clubcard
— ten Birds Eye fish fingers are £2.25,
but £1.75 with a Clubcard, for example.
(Use any Clubcard vouchers issued in
May 2020 by the end of this month or
they will expire.) You can get similar dis-
counts at Lidl if you use its Plus app.
Time: 10 minutes to register and
click through a cashback site
Saving: About £280 a year on QuidcoWEDNESDAY: CANCELLATION DAY
You can now cancel recurring payments
through the settings app on an iPhone, or
a Google Pay app on Android. Or use your
banking app, which will list your standing
orders and direct debits, and many can
be culled in a click. Check your iTunes
and Amazon accounts for subscriptions
like Netflix and ditch those you no longer
use. Ensure that you are on the most cost-
effective plans. For example, individual
Spotify Premium accounts are £9.99 a
month but a family plan is £16.99 for six
accounts.
Time: 30 minutes
Saving: up to £265THURSDAY: CLAIM WHAT YOU ARE OWED
There are plenty of reasons why the gov-
ernment might owe you money. If you
have to work from home, for instance,
even only some of the time, you can claim
tax relief on £6 a week — or if you record
the exact amount you spend on gas, elec-
tric, water and phone calls due to work
you can claim tax relief on that.
If you are over state pension age and
need help with personal care, you can
claim £61.85 or £92.40 a week attendance
allowance. If you care for someone for
more than 35 hours a week (and they get
some form of care or disability allow-
ance) you can claim £69.70 a week carer’sBeat the inflation spike
and the cost of living
crisis with the Moneyteam’s budgeting tips
‘I MOVED JOB TO SAVE ON PETROL’
Anna Bailey, 23, moved into her first
home in Tamworth in March, where
she lives with her rabbit, Bonnie.
She has changed jobs,taking a new
role in sales mainly because it meant
that she could walk to work and save
on petrol costs.
She used to spend £68 a week to
get to her job at a dairy wholesaler
30 minutes’ drive away. Now it’s
a 15-minute walk to her new job
at a hygiene company.
“My fuel was costing nearly as
much as my mortgage each month.”
Anna has also saved money by not
buying a TV or broadband for her
new house — instead she pops over
to her parents’ to watch Casualty.allowance, as long as you don’t earn over
£135 a week after tax.
Time: 60 minutes for WFH relief
Saving: £124.80 a yearFRIDAY: OVERPAY YOUR MORTGAGE
If the rate that you earn on your savingsaccount is lower than what you pay on
your mortgage it makes sense to overpay
rather than save. With mortgage rates
rising, more of us are in this position.
Most lenders will let you overpay up to
10 per cent of your mortgage balance
every year. For a 25-year, £200,000