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Govt fails to honour 2.5m student loan promises Interest rate drops but won’t follow deflation Last week, an announcement was snuck out meaning millions of graduates with outstanding student loans will soon pay no interest, though the change should've been bigger! Pre-1998 loan rate drops to -0.4%. From Sept, the 340,000 graduates with these loans will see the rate drop from 3.8% to -0.4% meaning loans'll actually shrink over the year. '98-onward loans dropped to 0%. The 2.5m with loans who started uni later will see their interest drop from 1.5% to 0% from Sept. It's all about deflation. The student loan rate changes each year in Sept based on the RPI inflation rate in the prior March. This March's inflation was -0.4% (deflation) so the interest rate should drop to that for ALL loans, yet the government has used a technicality to prevent 98-onward loans matching deflation. This breaks a binding principle. Student loans have always been set using inflation, so there's no "real cost" to them. While 0% loans sound cheap, it means former students' purchasing power is being eroded, as with deflation (prices dropping) loans costs should be shrinking too. This is the one thing that wasn't supposed to happen, while currently students with loans of £10,000 will only be £40 a year out of pocket, the worry is once any principle is broken it's very difficult to fix, and deflation's now -1.2%. There's been a petition at No. 10 started to ask the Prime Minister to rethink while there's still time. Further Info: Should I Pay Off My Student Loan?, Student MoneySaving

Week of Tue 12 - Mon 18 May '09 (Last week's position) 1. Freebies (1) 2. Do Surveys for Cash (New) 3. Top Savings Accounts (4) 4. Top Cash ISAs (2) 5. Sat Navs (New) 6. Cheap Travel Money (6) 7. Cheap Train Deals (3) 8. Cheap Flights (9) 9. Credit Ratings Guide (7) 10. Balance Transfers (New) Unsurprisingly new guide Survey Sites, showing you how and where to make extra, free dosh, is in at number two, plus last week's £40 Sat Navs proved popular, new in at five. Plus Balance Transfers snuck back into the top 10 after Barclaycard launched a new top long-term BTs card last week. The above excludes daily deals notes

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The Ones Not To Miss MSE

New! EVERYONE can call home from mobiles at UK call costs when in Europe or Oz.
This summer (Jun-Aug), a Vodafone promotion means it will only charge members of its free passport scheme standard UK call costs or use inclusive mins, when holidaying in most European & Australasian countries. Existing Vodafone Customers: Contract customers can join the free scheme by texting 'Passport' to 97888, or 2345 on Pay-As-You-Go. Non-Vodafone Customers: Get a FREE Vodafone PAYG sim (£10 gets you 100 mins & 300 texts), put it in your phone to join the free passport scheme, then switch it for your normal sim while away; you'll need an unlocked handset. FULL step-by-step info in the Forum Note: Vodafone Deal Related: Mobile Roaming, Unlock Your Mobile

2for1 vouchers Last Chance Pizza Express! New Strada & Giraffe & £1 Walkabout burger. Plus Prezzo, GBK, Zizzi, Caffe Uno & Sizzling Pubs click 'n' print vouchers. See the Daily Deals List: Restaurant Vouchers

New! 30% off Gap voucher in £1 mag, 15% off Heals; 20% off online at Karen Millen & Warehouse. These join L.K Bennett and Morrisons in the Daily Deals List: Shopping Vouchers

Fix your savings now? Lock-in at over 4% as Bank of England says rates will stay low
Disappointingly for savers, many economists read last week's Bank of England Inflation Report to mean base rate will stay at 0.5% into next year. Fixed Saving: These pay guaranteed rates higher than the top variable accounts, so if predictions are right 1 yr fixes are good value. Though beware, you can't access your cash. Top 1 yr fixs: If you've £5,000+ West Brom BS pays 4.27%, some question its stability, though, like all there, it has the UK govt's £50,000 guarantee. For £1,000+ ICICI* pays 4% & for £500 The AA's* 3.75%. Top Variable: For £10,000+ Ulster Bank's 3.46% instant access, incl a short-term bonus. For £25,000+ Investec* matches the top 5 accounts' avg rate & currently pays 3.12%, yet it needs 3mths' notice to withdaw. FULL rate & safety info & more options in the Updated Guide: Top Savings Related: Savings Safety, Fixed Savings

Sub £10 prescription glasses, inc. lenses, frames & UV/glare/scratch protection. Single lens glasses for a rock bottom £5 - £8, plus £3.50 p&p. See the Forum Note: Cheap Specs

Stop Junk Mail, Calls, Texts, Faxes and Spam E-mails in minutes. Updated Guide
It’s possible to slam the metaphorical door in the face of junk mail, calls, faxes, texts and e-mails in minutes, for free. Sadly though, illegal marketers are much tougher to tackle. This is a fully rewritten and reresearched guide to blocking out all those people desperately trying to flog you stuff. Full Guide: Stop Junk Mail & More Related: Free Anti-virus Software, Free Office Software, Free ID Fraud Protection

Urgent! Ends Fri. M&S 1p sale, inc. ties, cuff links, sweets, jewellery. 20 items for 1p in all UK stores (while stocks last). See the Daily Deals List: High Street Sales

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Half Term. 2for1s or better at Alton Towers/Thorpe Pk/Chessington/M Tussauds! Full price up to £36 so major savings. For these and more see the Daily Deals List: Cheap days out

Get a year's 0% on new spending. Top new credit card if you NEED it. Updated Guide
Tesco's just improved its Clubcard Credit Card, giving new customers 12 mths' 0% interest on spending (then 16.9% APR), just pipping M&S's 10 mths' 0% (then 15.9% APR). Who's it good for? If you need to make a big purchase, and have budgeted for it, this lets you spread the cost over a year, and pay NO interest. If you can't fully repay the debt in a year, shift it to a cheap balance transfer card. Shifting existing debts? The top balance transfer cards are Virgin's* 0% for 16 mths with a 2.98% fee (then 18.6% APR), or Barclaycard Platinum's 6.3% for three years. FULL pros, cons and alternatives in the Updated Guide: 0% Credit Cards Related: Balance Transfers, Cheap Loans, Credit Card Shuffle

Urgent Ends Friday! RAC cover £8 (AA £10). Special, even bigger than normal cashback deals mean costs are at a minimum. See the Deals Note: Breakdown Cover Related: Cheap Breakdown Cover

The Budget Planner. Vid of the week. Free tool to assess your finances Inflation, the credit crunch, economic slowdown and house prices have radically changed many people's financial situation. If you were previously spending just within your means, price rises could cause you to overspend. The free budget planner is designed to assess every aspect of your finances and tell you whether you spend or earn more. Vid of the week: An easy guide with tips & tricks to show you how to do the perfect budget in the Full Guide: Budget Planning Related: Boost Your Income £2 for 3 nights' camping at 55 UK sites. Normally £40ish. Valid for tent or caravan stays Sun-Thurs until 2 July. Just download a voucher. Full details in the Deals Note: Hotel Sales Nintendo Wii £145 (Usually £170) in-store at ASDA. Ends Sunday, go quick if you want one. Plus other consoles in the updated Deals Note: Cheap Games Consoles

Applications for MSE Charity Grants close 31 May. Available for Individuals or Charities
MSE’s given £600,000+ to various charities since it was set-up. Now we’ve our own new "The MSE Charity", you can apply for money towards financial literacy courses & charities/groups for consumer or debt education projects. Apply: The MSE Charity. Money given so far: MSE Charity Grants Related: MSE’s Charity Donations, How MSE's Financed

30,000 more £19 Travelodge summer rooms on sale now. The budget hotel chain's added new UK rooms at £19 (usually £29-£59) for stays 1 July - 31 Aug. See the Deals Note: Travelodge Sale Related: Cheap Hotels

Thrifty Ways Book. How to fix it, mend it, repair it, grow it, reuse it
Thrift is back, so we wanted to remind you about Thrifty Ways the bestselling book written off the Old Style MoneySaving forum board, with hints, tips & techniques for gardening, presents, house cleaning & more. Where's it cheapest? The lowest price is £4.99 inc. p&p at the Book Depository. Proceeds to Charity. Every penny of my 'author's' proceeds goes to the MSE Charity Fund. Other MoneySaving Books: The Money Diet, The 3 Most Important Lessons

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The Big & Easy Ways to Save Checklist

Quick links or click the titles for full pros, cons, alternatives & more savings

0% Balance Transfers: Top pick: Virgin* 16 mths 0%, 2.98% fee (APR 18.6%) Car Insurance: Use both MoneySupermarket* & GoCompare* Also see: Van, Motorbike Cheap Gas & Elec + Cashback! Top comparison site: Energyhelpline* Top Bank Account: £100, 0% overdraft, free travel ins with A&L* Free Budget Planner: Use the free planner or do a complete Money Makeover Sell Old Mobiles: Top picks: Love2Recycle*, Envirofone*, Mopay*. Top Cashback Credit Card: Top pick: Amex Plat* 5% for 3 mths. (APR 18.9%) Reclaim £1,000s: Full Mortgage Fees, C'cil Tax, Endowments, Bank Charges, PPI guides Free New-Mortgage Guide: Order a copy now for free!Also see: Remortgage Guide Cheap Broadband: Plusnet* £6/mth up to 10 Gb download. Holiday Bargains: Flights, Travel Insurance, Hotels, Package Holidays, Travel Money

More MoneySaving MSE

Reminder. Great 'Improve Money Rules in 50 words' hunt. There's still time to add your top 50-word suggestions for improving money rules, the best of which'll be compiled and sent to a selection of MPs for their views. Great Hunt: Improve Money Rules Got a Halifax Student account? Did you get £3,000 overdraft in first year? Halifax's student account promises the biggest 0% overdraft available (£3,000) and says students can get it in their first year. Yet the bank's told a student, in documents we've seen, that the max overdraft allowed in year one for any student is £1,750. Halifax says this is an error and insists, for those who meet its credit criteria, the limit's £3,000. If you have this account, we want to see if anyone actually got the full £3,000 in year one (aside from credit rating problems). Feedback: Report your experiences. Full info in the News Story: Student Overdraft Related: Student MoneySaving, Top Student Accounts New Reclaim: Do you think you've been missold an investment? We're compiling a full reclaiming guide, so we want to hear experiences of anyone who thinks they're affected. For full info, read the Forum Note: Missold Investments Related: PPI Reclaiming, Discount Brokers MONEY MORAL DILEMMA. Would you put £10 in Kitty's kitty? You started a new job a fortnight ago, it's one of your new colleagues, Kitty's, 50th birthday and everyone's been asked to put £10 in Kitty's birthday kitty for the present. Yet you're not flushed with cash having not been paid yet, and you hardly know her. What would you do? Enter the Money Moral Maze: Would you put £10 in Kitty's birthday kitty? Previous MMDs: View All 'Amazing mum' book giveaway result. 50 copies up for grabs, find out if you won in the Forum Note: Amazing Mum book giveaway Top deals from small hotels & B&B owners. 30% off & 3for2 nights Last week, we gave small Hotel & B&B owners a chance to offer MoneySavers an original discount on stays. There were offers galore inc. 3for2 nights at a 5AA* Somerset B&B, a 3for2 Chester weekend nights and 3for2 at a Morecambe seaside B&B. See the Great Hunt: Hotel and B&B owners, offer MoneySavers a discount CHEAP FLIGHTS SALES ALERT Airline: Ryanair. Price: sub. £8 e/w. Ends: Midnight Thurs 21 May. Our top pick budget airline sale this week is Ryanair's, with flights to a host of European destinations, from a range of UK airports, for less than £8 each way (including some taxes and charges). Tickets are at this price until midnight Thurs 21 May, on selected flights travelling during June and July 09. How to quickly find the sales flights: Don't go direct, instead use the Budget Airline FlightChecker and ask it to find all flights under £10. Non-Budget Airline Tools: These are listed in the Cheap Flights guide. Related Travel MoneySaving: Cheap Hotels, Spending Abroad, Cheap Currency, Travel Insurance, Mobile Roaming

Q. My employer says it's best if I contribute to my company pension via a salary sacrifice system. What does this mean and will it save me money? Martin's A. Rather than contributing from your after-tax pay, contributions under salary sacrifice come from pre-tax pay, so your official wage is reduced by the amount deposited. Say you earned £30,000 a year and put £3,000 a year of it into your pension, your new official wage would be £27,000, with an additional £3,000 deposited into to your pension pot. While that money would've been tax free anyway if you'd paid it into your pension direct, this way it's also National Insurance (NI) free as that's only deducted from your new lower wage. This means it's an average 11% saving for basic rate payers and 1% for higher rate payers on the amount deposited. There's also a bonus for higher rate taxpayers, as normally it'd only be given the basic 20% tax relief and they'd need to claim the further tax relief, this way that's done automatically. The downsides are, as your official wage is lower, it can harm credit applications like mortgages, and reduce entitlements to salary-related benefits such as death in service. It can also reduce your entitlement to the Second State Pension and could tie you into paying a specified amount for 12 months. Discuss: Salary sacrifice Suggest: A question of the week (big general issues not personal q’s pls)

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Quick Forum Tips Warning! Bargains listed here tend to sell out quickly Daily Bargains Update Tips, Tricks & Treats

Top Deal! 8ft Trampoline & Enclosure £80 In stores from 25 May Boing Boing! Heroes seasons 1-2 box set £17 all-in. Super deal Free Accessible Britain book for disabled car drivers Just fill an online form Worth £7 Guinness World Book of Records 2009 £2.50 Normally £10-20ish. Beat that! Free Lonely Planet mini-guides for Russia & Rome. Molto Bene! Don't forget your local market Give it a go Market-ing Discussion Debt Free Wannabe chat of the week: What'll happen after Debt-free day? Competitions thread of the week: Give spare prizes to charity Old Style (Thrift) Board thread of the week: Rubbish Question!

Great ‘Cheap Cuppa’ Hunt: Your top (PG?) Tips to bag cheap tea
PG Tips' says it'll hike tea prices by up to 15% next month due to supply problems, so you could stock up now. Better still we want your tips for a perfect cuppa, top spotted bargain, how many times can you reuse bags, what are your favourite own brands? Add your ideas/read other peoples': Great ‘Cheap Cuppa’ Hunt Past Great Hunts: Recession Survival, View all

Board of the week: Made redundant or expecting to be? Redundancy & Redundancy Planning
Month after month we hear new jobless figures, to help as well as the Redundancy Guide; we've a Redundancy forum board for sharing MoneySaving info, and support for those who've been made redundant or those worried it may happen. Discussions Include: Benefits when taking voluntary redundancy, Last in First Out Rule?, and Redundancy & Season Ticket Loan. Related: Recession-proof your Finances, Debt Problems, Free Budget Planner

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Andrea's Freebies Freebies, Freebies, Freebies

Miss Dior Perfume, Wychwood Artists' Album Download, Family Activities, Month's GoView trial for PSP, Bicester-Oxford Rail Travel

Odds and Ends MSE

Martin's Appearances...Weds 20 - Tues 26 May
These are scheduled appearances, though other ad hocs may happen. See the appearances list for updates.

• Thurs, GMTV, ITV1, sometime between 8:30 & 9:30am. Deals of the Week

This week's Martin's Blog: "Pulling out of Govt’s Student finance day after student loan fiasco"
"Pine nuts – strange taste warning…" and "Steal Pepsi Max: promoting theft of their own product". Read m'blogs (or RSS users access)

What should we pay our MPs? This week's poll. Vote and MP Pay discussion.

Pizza Express is the hottest 2for1! 8055 voted last week. The ubiquitous Pizza Express chain took almost a quarter of the vote, with 23%. Pizza Hut came second with 18%, and Wagamama third with 13%. See Top 2for1s poll results.

Archna's Free Game of the Week! Is this a fair game? You'll certainly learn from your mistakes! Brain Drain

Face art. That's it for this week, but before we go, as this weekend is the biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships it's the perfect time for some facial-hair celebration

We hope you save some money

Martin & the MSE team

Explanation of * Links

FSA NOTE: Referring people to insurers or insurance intermediaries can in some circumstances require FSA authorisation. For this reason, Martin Lewis of Shepherd's Studios, Rockley Road, Shepherd's Bush, London W14 0EH is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.

How this site is financed. Any links with a * by them are affiliated. That means go via this link and a contribution may be made to MoneySavingExpert.com, which helps it stay ad-free and free to use. You shouldn't notice any difference, the links don't impact the product at all and the editorial line (the things I write) is NEVER impacted by it. If it isn't possible to get an affiliate link for the best product, it's still included in exactly the same way. As I believe transparency is important, I'm including the following 'un-affiliated' web-addresses for the same things: icicibank.co.uk, theaa.com, investec.com, uk.virginmoney.com, energyhelpline.com, alliance-leicester.co.uk, envirofone.com, love2recycle.com, moneysupermarket.com, mopay.co.uk, americanexpress.co.uk, talktalk.co.uk, .plus.net, tiscali.co.uk. Read more about this in how this site is financed.

MoneySavingExpert.com is the free to use Consumer Revenge website focused on how to save you cash. It’s owned, and run by ultra-specialised journalist and bestselling author Martin Lewis. On TV amongst other things Martin is GMTV’s Money SavingExpert and presents money programmes for ITV1 Tonight. On Radio Martin has regular slots on Radio 2 Vine and Radio 1 Whiley. He’s also a columnist for the News of The World, Moneywise and the Sunday Post. Find out more: About the site and its funding.

Disclaimer: This e-mail is based on journalistic research. It does not constitute financial advice. Any information should be considered in regard to your own specific circumstances. All tips are followed at your own risk and should be followed up with your own research Full Terms & Conditions.

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