Personal Finance and Investing

Apologies for the mixed animal metaphors but both apply particularly well to Sir Roy McNulty’s report on value for money in the UK rail industry, published today.

Given the scale of the public subsidy and the painfully high fares inflicted on passengers, the review offered a great opportunity to address the long standing problems within the privatised rail industry.

It is disappointing that this opportunity has been squandered. 

All the evidence points to inefficiency and waste brought about by a complex and fragmented system of multiple operators, contractual relationships leading to unnecessarily high transaction costs and public money leaking out into train operators’ profits and shareholder dividends.

McNulty’s remedies?  Further fragmentation, greater “commercial freedom” for operators and a predictable, though misdirected, attack on rail workers’ pay and conditions.

The TUC and rail unions are united in their condemnation of the report’s recommendations, issuing this joint statement today.

The most disappointing, and yet unsurprising, aspect is the complete failure to seriously consider the benefits of a national integrated rail system under public ownership.  Here we come to the elephant in the room that McNulty, Secretary of State Philip Hammond and, let’s face it, successive Labour and Conservative governments have tried their best to ignore.  Historical comparisons with British Rail and benchmarking against European networks clearly demonstrate that integrated, state run systems are more efficient.   But this option remains off the table.  Talk of avoiding large scale structural change masks an ideological blind spot to the benefits of public ownership.

Perhaps more alarming is the attack on rail workers pay and conditions.

In his interim report of December 2010, Sir Roy McNulty made the claim that “a large increase in staff costs” was one of the “principle drivers of the increase in taxpayer support”.  We challenged him on this.  There is no correlation between the big spike in taxpayer subsidy from 2002 and rail industry pay, which for most rail workers has remained close to RPI inflation in that period.  In a letter to the TUC earlier

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Do you have some money socked away, or are you planning to sock some money away for the purpose of investing? Are you wondering why investing would be a smart idea and how you can best benefit from the act of investing? Simply put, you are going to want to invest so that you can create and build wealth. Investing tends to be relatively painless in nature, and there are numerous rewards to speak of. When you invest in the stock market, you will have much more money on hand for things like education, recreation and retirement.

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OLD HARRY – You can’t escape the irony of talking about a roadtrip when traveling along a single road of a sparsely populated set of windswept islands in the middle of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. While the road here is long, it only meanders slightly; you never really get lost. You do make stops on the journey, though, listening to the tales of island storytellers, fishermen, or wanderers who somehow chose to make Quebec’s Magdalen Islands home.

In this unlikely setting, I discovered a landscape peppered with small colorful houses and dreamy vistas. The

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Congratulations to you, recent grad! You’ve just received your degree, and now you’re ready to enter the world.

But get ready, because you’re not in college anymore.

Whether you’re entering the working world or continuing your job search, you’re going to need to budget, especially if you’ll be paying off student loans, like over a third of Credit Karma users.

Consider some of the following tips for making smart money choices to budget your money.

Watch your costs.

Credit cards. In order to build your credit, a credit card can be a useful tool. But if your

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