Are interest rate cuts about to stall?

Welcome to This Is Money podcast sponsored by Charles Stanley Direct. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Simon Lambert today is Helen Crane. And coming up are the interest rate cuts about to stall and what will that mean for our money? Looking to fix your mortgage? Should you go for two or five years or even longer?

Also, today farmers and the inheritance tax crisis. How on earth did we get into this mess and is there a way out of it? And Argos refunded my coffee machine to an empty voucher card that I binned. What on earth do I do now? What do I do now? Don't forget you stop to date with all the latest breaking money news just to go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app.

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Take control today with Charles Stanley Direct. Sign up now. Investment involves risk. But first, inflation is back on the uprising to above the Bank of England's 2% target in October to a six-month high. At 2.3%, though, it's nowhere near its peak of a couple of years ago when CPI stood at 11.1%. So how concerned should we be? Experts think it's even less likely we'll get another rate cut this year, though, but what about after that?

Helen, welcome. What was October's rise down to? So CPI inflation October was 2.3% up from 1.7% in September. A fairly sort of hefty rise, and that also takes it above the Bank of England's long-term target, which is 2%. There was an expectation that it would maybe drift up a little bit, but that's slightly more than expected.

And it's poured a bit of cold water on expectations about where the base rate is going and where sort of inflation might be going in future. So we've seen a lot of tempered predictions on whether there'll be more base rate cuts going into next year. Some analysts are now saying that the base rate might not go down until maybe spring of next year. You know, previously predicted that the base rate would sort of continually fall from now sort of into next year. And it seems like that's

now not likely to happen. So bad news potentially for people with mortgages, we're already seeing mortgage rates creep up on the back of those damper predictions, potentially good news for savers there with perhaps some savings rate rises. When the Bank of England is looking at whether to cut rates or live where they are or even increase them, it's not just looking at this one-off monthly figure though, is it?

No, it's not just looking at this figure. And actually, what you have to remember, of course, is that the inflation figure is backward looking. It tells you how much prices have risen over the past year. What the Bank of England will be looking at as well is what it thinks is going to happen to inflation, what the inflation repressures are in the system, and how much it needs to adjust interest rates in order to try to keep inflation at or close to target.

Obviously, the fact that inflation has gone back above 2% is of concern and has certainly put a dent in hopes for an interest rate cut in the near future, as Helen said. In fact, it looks like an interest rate cut in December is now completely off the table. It would be very surprising if we got a December pre-Christmas interest rate cut. The big question now hangs over those interest rate cuts next year. When's the first one going to be? How many are we going to get?

As this was largely down to energy prices rising, the energy price cap going up, and the energy price cap has been announced today that it's going to go up ever so slightly again, but only very, very slightly. It's going to add something like £21 or something, so it's going to be a one-on-a-bit percent rise. That's not going to feed through into lots more inflation coming from energy prices. For example, if the energy price cap had gone up by another 10 percent,

But what you do have to look at is the fact that once we get round to that energy price cap kicking in, you're going to be comparing that with what were energy prices a year ago and how much higher is it there than it was a year ago. But the big concern for the Bank of England, that the Bank of England has been talking about this week, boss Andrew Bailey commenting on two things. The national insurance rise for employers in the budget and the higher minimum wage.

Both of these things are likely to add to price pressure, particularly in sectors which are very exposed to wages and the wages of lower pay people. Retail, services, that kind of thing. Supermarkets, for example.

are going to get a big bill off the back of having to pay extra national insurance for their employees because they employ a lot of people. Tesco, for example, I think is still the UK's largest private sector employer and also because that lower earnings limit where the employer's national insurance kicks in is being brought down as well. It's not just the percentage rise in employer national insurance, it's bringing down that lower earnings limit.

But also, they've got to pay a higher minimum wage. Now, obviously, a higher minimum wage is a good thing. And if you look at people's earnings over the past five to 10 years, we've been very successful in pulling up the earnings of lower pay people thanks to the continued rise.

in the minimum wage. But that is inflationary because it means that all of those people who are helping you in the supermarket, all that kind of stuff, they're going to be being paid more. You've got extra employer costs on that. But it's also the suppliers as well. It's the supplier costs that are then feeding through to people like supermarkets, retailers, people who are providing services and so on. And the Bank of England thinks that that is going to add to inflationary pressure. And of course, they're also looking

at what's happening in the world, and they are looking across the Atlantic at Donald Trump, who is seen as being an inflationary president. The moves that he is going to make are likely to add to inflation rather than to pull inflation down.

And how concerned should we be? I mentioned a little bit earlier about that 11.1 figure. And what we always sort of need to remind ourselves, I think, is whenever we talk about inflation, it's not like because it's coming down, that means prices are coming down. It just means they're not going up as fast. And so we're still feeling that 11.1%

Yes, exactly. You were completely right in saying inflation coming down doesn't mean that prices are coming down at all. I was in the supermarket yesterday and paid £7.95 for a bottle of olive oil. Those are the kind of things that we're all still experiencing.

It's a cumulative effect, isn't it? You know, under these increased cost pressures for a couple of years now, and you're right in that that's not going away. I think one thing to mention is obviously inflation is nowhere near the place it was a couple of years ago. I think we've moved on a lot since that time, and 2.3% is, again, it's close to the target. We're not in that.

is such a huge, huge year-on-year inflation rises. But it is still a concern. And people, for example, who've seen their mortgage go up hugely when they've re-fixed it in the last couple of years, that just heaps on so much onto kind of budgets. And it's effective many things going up over time. And we've seen some wage rises, which we sort of temper that to some extent. But inflation has really sort of hammered people's budgets over the last couple of years.

Yeah, Simon, the cost of living crisis, it feels like it's got some ways to go, especially with certain sections of society, particularly, I'm thinking young people, anyone wants to get on the property ladder. Helen, talking about the fact that the trajectory for rate cuts slowing down could be, of course, better news for savers, but not so good for those with mortgages. We've got some house price figures saying they're going up, inflation is going up,

mortgages, what's going to happen to those as a result of a slowing down of interest rate cuts. If you're a first-time buyer, you must be scratching your head saying, is this ever going to be over?

Yes, and the problem obviously with an inflation spike, the cost to live in crisis, whatever you want to call it, is that when it subsides, stuff doesn't get cheaper. It doesn't go back to the price that it was. Some things do. So for example, petrol, for example, which is hugely volatile, it's probably lucky that not everything in life swings around in price as much as petrol. But petrances can go back to the point where they were.

But then they could rapidly go back up again. But those daily essentials that we spend on, often they don't go back to the point where they were. Everything just continues to remain more expensive. It's just not getting more expensive at the same very fast rate.

And if you look at total inflation over a relatively short period, I'm not going to say the period because I can't remember exactly how long it is, but I did look this up not that long ago and we're talking like a few years basically, you had a total of just over 20% inflation. So everything's just got, life's got a fifth more expensive.

Most people's wages haven't gone up by 20% over that period of time. Now we are back in the fortunate position where wages are rising faster than inflation, which is actually where you want to be. That's where people genuinely get wealthier. That's a rise in real incomes.

But that comes off the back of a really long period where people didn't get above inflation rises, where their real incomes didn't increase. So the really difficult thing for people in the UK was that the cost of living crisis landed slap bang on the back of a decade-long period where wages had hardly risen at all and they hadn't managed to keep pace with inflation quite often.

So, people were already feeling the squeeze, they were already feeling poorer, and then everything's got suddenly much more expensive. So, you're dealing with all of those things that are much more expensive, your energy bills. Before we started this, me and Helen were talking about energy bills. And, you know, it's that time of year, isn't it, when they start going up. I've been getting monthly emails from Octopus telling me that they're going to put my direct debit up. I was like, oh God, here we go again.

buying olive oil in the shop, going out for dinner. Going out for dinner is a luxury, but boy is going out for dinner expensive nowadays, you know, buying a drink in the pub. It's just a cup of coffee, four quid.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to pay £4 for a cup of coffee, but you're going to struggle to pay less than £3.50. The point is life is much more expensive than it was. We are feeling the pinch. And then you look at people like First Time Buyers, as you said, who are staring down the barrel of the cost of everything else going up and also mortgage rates having gone up. And that means that because house prices haven't really come down that much,

They are faced with a real crunch because the cost of affording that house based on the mortgage is hundreds of pounds a month more than it was at the same time as all their bills have gone up. But it's exactly the same problem for people who want to move up the ladder. The price of those properties that they want to move to hasn't really got any more expensive, but the cost of paying a monthly mortgage in order to do it has got more expensive at the same time as everything else has.

So it is a genuine squeeze still on people's incomes and not the place that we hope to be I guess. I think I guess we hope that everything would be picking up at this point. But I will say on a note of optimism that I do genuinely think that

Despite the best efforts of a new government and the previous one, which definitely deserves some blame for quite a lot of stuff, the economy is in a much better place in the UK than most people think. And I do genuinely think that actually next year, people are going to start feeling better off and things will pick up and we might actually see more of an uptick in growth than people think.

That's the spirit, Simon. Talking about mortgages, Helen, if you're looking to fix your mortgage, you might be asking, how long for? You've actually got to read a question. My wife and I are remarketing at the end of the year and trying to weigh up our options between a two year and a five year. There isn't a huge difference in monthly repayments between the two, but just trying to get a sense of what will happen to interest rates in the future is a challenge. So what do you reckon? Helen.

This is a really difficult question. Unfortunately, there is no completely right answer. Recently, a lot of people have been fixing their mortgage for two years on the basis that they thought interest rates were going to go down. As Simon was saying earlier, a series of interest rate cuts in the coming months, which should have bought

mortgage rates down. But now it looks like that's not happening. People think, well, you know, actually, if they're going to stay around the same way or even rise, you know, we have seen some slight rate rises in the last few weeks off the back of these more sort of tempered expectations about where the beta it might go. Maybe it is worth fixing in for for five years, you know, if things

aren't going to get better or will maybe get worse. So I bought a flat in October and I fixed my mortgage for five years and some people said I was completely mad for a while. I thought I was a bit mad. When rates were going down, I was like, oh God, have I made a completely wrong move?

Now they're going up a bit again. I feel a bit more like maybe it wasn't the worst decision. At the end of the day, we don't really know. I think one thing that is certain is that it's very, very unlikely that rates are going to go as low as they were, or pre-October 22, pre-the mini budget, where some people getting rates below 1%. It's very unlikely that that's going to happen in the next two years or

in the next five years I mean never say never but that is extremely unlikely so I think it's making a call on where you think rates might be going and also what your circumstances are so you know if you think you might want to move or need to move in the next two three years obviously don't take a five year fix if you're quite happy where you are and you know you can you can comfortably afford the the rate then maybe consider taking a five year I think

As always with mortgage rates, there's never a sort of perfect time. It's all based on your circumstances and what you're doing in your life and what you can afford. I think good advice always is if you're happy with the rate, the payments are comfortable for you, then by all means that's a good rate to take.

But you know, even the other way, I think you can sort of be a bit hamstrung by your mortgage rate. So I've got a friend who first on buyer who fixed her mortgage for five years when rates were really quite low. So a few years ago, I think she got a rate of about 2.5% and fixed for five years. She's now just about to have a first baby and would really like to upside. But she's thinking actually our mortgage rate is so low compared to what we would get if we move that it just seems to make zero financial sense to move. So she's actually

will just stick here for a couple of years. I mean, it's difficult to feel sorry for people who've got such a low mortgage rate, but it just kind of shows how your mortgage, the best sort of mortgage decisions don't always kind of work out in the long run. Life is life, but yes, it's definitely a tricky one to call as to whether to fix for two or five years at the minute. Simon, what's your instinct?

My instinct is to consider the overall costs, basically. So if you fix for two years, you're gonna pay a fee now to get a mortgage, most likely, if you're chasing a low rate, certainly. You're gonna pay another fee in two years time, and then you'd pay, and if you did another two year fix, you'd pay one in year six, by which point five year fix would have finished. With the five year fix, you'd only pay one fee. So factor that in.

Factor in also how much monetary difference there is. You know, how much are you really saving? If you're saving a considerable amount, then maybe it's worth taking the punt. If you're saving 30 or 40 quid, then maybe, you know, maybe wouldn't bother. It does add up. I mean, that's obviously, you know, 360 pounds a year going into your pocket, not the banks, but in the grand scheme of things,

you know it might not be worth it and I would look at the kind of the elements of are you likely to move if you think you're going to move in the next five years then be careful about taking a five-year fix but are you genuinely likely to move okay people always massively overestimate this one most people don't and also look at how much that security matters to you

How important is it just to know exactly how much it's going to cost you every month and you just don't need to worry about it? Don't anchor on the old rates, you know, the one and a half per cent or whatever. It's highly unlikely mortgage rates going back down to that.

And in the scenario where mortgage rates go all the way back down to that, something bad will have happened economically that might mean that you're really quite glad that you do actually have that fixed rate because you could find there's a scenario, an economic crash scenario that drives rates down, but then mortgage lenders pull up the draw bridges and they don't want to be lending people money anyway.

Then just also I would think about the situation where you basically look at this from the perspective of how it fits into the whole of the rest of your financial life as well. And I would speak to a mortgage broker. And if the mortgage broker says to you two years, definitely two years, ask yourself the question, are they just telling me this? Yeah, because they want to sell me another mortgage in two years time. That's it for part one.

I'm joined now by Rob Morgan of Charles Stanley Direct for our weekly investing explain feature. Rob, we've got to read a question, presumably thinking of doing this off the back of the Trump presidential election and markets rising since then. I'm thinking of buying a US growth investment trust or fund. What do I need to consider before I buy?

Well, firstly, there's a lot of choice, at least when it comes to funds, not quite as many investment trusts investing in the space. And a lot of people as well will buy exchange traded funds too for their US exposure, which replicate the performance of certain indices, often the S&P 500, and you can buy those by via an investment platform.

I am just like you can individual shares. And actually an ETF or passively managed fund could serve you quite well if you're primarily looking to plug into those giant growth companies in the US so the Nvidia's, Amazons and Metas of this world as they have lots invested in

these particular shares and there are major parts of the index. And the so-called magnificent seven giant tech stocks account for about a third of the US market, which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you see things going forward.

For a more diverse but still growth orientated approach, you could consider an actively managed US growth fund where the manager aims to beat the index over the long term through being more selective and backing shares that outperform. There's no guarantees of that, of course. And that has been a hard task for many active managers in recent years to keep up with the dominance of those big tech stocks. But there is a sense now that we're in a bit of a different environment with

Donald Trump's particular economic policies in particular, and that a broad range of stocks could take up the leadership of the US market, notably small and mid-sized companies where valuations are less demanding and perhaps prospects are less well appreciated. So there's a lot of different approaches in this space. So take a look at the literature of any funds you're considering to understand the objectives and the philosophy of the manager to get a feel for how it might perform in different circumstances.

Make sure you understand the risks too, which are laid out in the fund's key investor information document. Some funds, for example, are more concentrated, which means that they invest in fewer holdings, and that means they could either outperform or underperform the market as a whole by a wider margin. Others contain more smaller companies, which can be riskier, especially if they are at an earlier stage of their development, or they're unproven, or they're not yet profitable, and that really links back to the fund manager's general approach.

Fund charges as well are really important. They can be an impediment to investors' returns over the longer term, so it's really important to consider the charging structure of a fund as well as any add-on costs. The ongoing charges figure or OCF covers fund reporting costs, including the fund managers fees for running the fund, but check to see if there's a performance fee on top.

And if you consider investment trusts, do take account of the additional risks there. There can be some gearing or borrowing to invest, which adds to the risk. Plus shares in the trust can trade on a premium or more commonly a discount to net asset value, which reflects the value of the underlying assets. That can add to the volatility of the investment over the time, particularly in the short term.

Finally, don't just look at past performance. It's not necessarily a guide to the future. And if you need some ideas, investment platforms do typically have a list of pre-approved fund ideas, ours at Charles Janley. Direct, for instance, is called our preferred fund list. Rob, thank you very much. Thank you.

Welcome back. The farmers have written down wellies this week and descended on the capital to protest Labor's inheritance tax raid on family farms. But how do we get here? And how on earth do we fix it? Simon talked to me about agricultural property relief, what's changed, who will it affect, why farmers just so unhappy?

I mean, don't get me started on this one, honestly. Let's just skip over it. I think that we talked about this in our first post budget episode and highlighted that this was

probably going to cause a problem and lo and behold it's backfired massively. Basically because it seems to me that for some bizarre reason the government decided that it was totally okay for farmers to be the collateral damage

in another piece of terrible tax policy, where instead of actually thinking about something properly, they'd just rush something out, try and shut a loophole, raise a bit of money. Now bear in mind, this whole thing is only going to raise about 500 million pounds, I think, which is a lot of money, but in the context of government spending and revenue is a rounding error.

All of this for that. So what's happened? Right. The current situation and until things change is that you can pass on agricultural property free of inheritance tax. The idea behind this 40 year old exemption was to protect family farms so that when the family farm is passed down the generations and most family farms are passed down the generations, okay?

that it didn't have to be broken up in order to pay a big inheritance tax bill because land is worth quite a lot of money but farmers don't make that much money okay on paper they look really rich because they own all the land

But that's not like when a normal person owns a load of land, or for example a rich investor owns a load of land, they own that and it's like, great, I've got all that and I could sell it and I could cash it in. The farmer needs the land to do the farming thing that they do. Dead simple, that's why it's different. That's why a three million pound farm is different to someone having a three million pound house.

What the government decided to do was to stop this exemption in some way because it's been being taken advantage of. And it has been an open secret for many years that the very wealthy have been buying up farmland as an inheritance tax dodge. It's basically the easiest way to pass on tens of millions of pounds without paying any tax.

This has created a problem. We talked about this on the podcast before. I won't go into too much detail about it. My father-in-law lives in farming country, rural Shropshire. He sees this in action as wealthy landowners. Basically, any bit of farmland comes up for sale around there. They buy it and it's an inheritance tax storage. They get someone else to farm the land because the land has to be farmed to get it.

And then, but they're like absentee landlords, someone else farms the land. Sometimes they even leave the farmhouse as empty. And basically it means they can pass it on, you know, in Harrisville's tax free. Now the victims of this are actually farmers who get squeezed out of being able to buy more land. The real victims are actually like kind of young farmers or budding farmers who want to start up their own farm. Perhaps they are part of the family farm and they don't get on with the family member who owns the family farm. They'd like to start by themselves.

Or you and I, if we wanted to buy a bit of land, because the price has been driven up by wealthy investors who are children and people out. And you can see in the statistics that the percentage of farmland and pasture land that gets bought by farmers is down below 50% now. And there's been a big rise in private investors and institutional investors as well. Really big companies. Now, if you go up to a real shop share where my father-in-law is,

This is a problem up there because of that. It's also even more of a problem down here in the southeast where you also have the housing thing as well. You have people optioning land, so people are buying land because with the stroke of a planner's pen, you can get lottery style winning money off the back of it if someone allocates the grain belt to put some houses on.

So the Chancellor decided that agricultural property relief would be limited to £1m and after that you would still get a better deal on inheritance tax but it would be 50% off the standard rate so it would be taxed at 20%. In a way this is the worst possible solution because

It causes farmers a massive headache because they've now got an inheritance tax headache that they didn't have. And they don't have the kind of income that means they can just pay the inheritance tax bills from the income of the farm. So they might have to sell bits off. They have to think about passing it on early. There's all kinds of problems with that. But it still gives wealthy investors an inheritance tax break because, okay, they don't pay zero anymore, but they now pay 20%. So understandably,

you have to look at this and think that farmers are not to blame for thinking, why are you targeting us? What have we done? Because they are the victims of a crackdown on the very rich, taking advantage of a tax relief that's designed to protect them at the same time as this government and the government before completely bungled

the supposedly improved payment system after Brexit, their incomes are even more precarious than they have been, and I wrote in my column this week that I presume that somebody in the Treasury

maybe was told to sit down and watch Clarkson's farm before they did this. Maybe they didn't do that. But whilst he may not be your cup of tea, right, what Clarkson's farm does done and has one widespread acclaim from lots of people whose cup of tea he is not, is highlight just how hard it is to make money from farming in this country. You're literally being attacked from all sides and this is an extra one. I guess the point here is, why would you do this?

Why would you rush this out? Why would you bundle it out so quickly? It really isn't that difficult to work out who's a farmer and who's an investor holding the land. We're only talking, the figures show that we're only talking about like about 500 estates a year over the £1 million threshold.

I'm guessing that pretty much all of those get scrutinized anyway just to check that nobody's doing some tax dodging. It wouldn't be that difficult. It's like, are you a farmer? Do you live on the farm? Do you live in the farmhouse? Do you get up at five o'clock in the morning? Family owned the farm for years. Are you a investor? Do you live nowhere near the farmhouse?

Do you own multiple other properties? Do you have a house in Notting Hill? Things like that, just like little sniff tests to work out which is which. I think it's, I'd argue it's quite easy to work out who is third generation farmer and who is David Beckham or Jeremy Clarkson.

And obviously not just David Beckham and Jeremy Clarkson. And Jeremy Clarkson himself obviously was on this protest. And he said, like, he made the point. He's like, yeah, well, you know, obviously the inheritance tax was a massive benefit for me. But he did also say, but that's fine. Like, I can deal with this. Normal farmers can't. That was the point that he was making when he said that. And it does get glossed over. And I just think that, you know, also the government's figures on this don't really

The government claims that 72% farmers won't pay inheritance tax on the new rules. And I think their response to it has been a bit tinny and there's been all kinds of like, we'll just give it away early. No reflection on like the CGT elements of that or the fact that that might not actually be that easy to do and everything like that. And most people won't be affected. Yeah, you think you're affected. You're not affected.

And actually, the NFU say that this isn't the case. Land agents say this isn't the case. And the NFU has pointed out that defra zone figures indicate 66% of farms would be affected. And maybe you shouldn't have a totally unlimited inheritance tax-free break on farmland or big farms or land.

Maybe, you know, it should be taxed. We're all ultimately paying for that. Maybe we just shouldn't have inheritance tax at all. Maybe we should scrap inheritance tax. But I do know that this is just another layer on the onion of a really bad tax. It's basically a tax. There's a six-year-old report from the Office of Tax Simplification, gathering dust that says inheritance tax needs a proper overhaul.

It's widely hated, despite the fact that not that many people pay it, they've now bundled people's pensions in it, which is going to double the amount of people who are paying it. But this is just really badly thought out, and it could have been done so much better. And why do it now? If you didn't have time to think it out properly, don't do it.

And it's symptomatic of the terrible tax system that we have at the moment, not to go over old ground, 60% tax trap, removal of child benefit, cottage industry, and people trying to do less work on earn, less money, all this kind of stuff, frozen tax thresholds. It is just an absolute mess, to be honest. I mean, it is, Simon. Is it likely to change, though? Are they likely to have listened to the farmers and go, yeah, actually, probably not such a great idea?

And I think this is the problem. I can see what happens here is that the government digs in its heels and is stubborn on this, because it's got a massive majority, it's just been elected. And we need the money to save the NHS, is basically the line that's being trotted out. £500 million from, you know, inheritance tax on land is not going to save the NHS.

But I can see them digging in their heels. I could also see farmers just going, well, do you know what? We'll hold on to the land because if the Tories get elected, they'll put it back to the situation it was in anyway because they're going to turn this into a big thing. I could see wealthy investors doing it. If you're a wealthy investor and you own a load of land, well, you're still only 20% inheritance tax rather than 40. So you might as well hold on to it. And you might get a different government in four years time that puts it back to zero.

Now, I, however, do have another solution, which I think is better policy, which is that we could have tied this into helping people to be better farmers, to be better stewards of the land. We really need to improve biodiversity in this country. We need to do something about the massive nature depletion that we've seen due to the rise of industrial farming since the Second World War. We need to help them with climate change and the impacts of it. We need them to help us with climate change and the impacts of it.

And we also need to do more about food security. So we could have tied some of it into that. That would have been a good idea. And if I was the government and I was looking for a way out, that's what I'd do. I've also got a bolder idea that farmers will not like, right? But...

We continue to allow the zero inheritance tax break, which remember all of the rest of us taxpayers are picking up the tab for, but it comes with a trade-off. If you are a big landowner and you want your land to be inheritance tax-free, you have to allow us access with a Scottish style right to roam on it.

Now, that Scottish style right to Rome is not a right to just go anywhere and do anything you want. But in England, we are shut out of 92% of the land. That's figures from the Ramblers Association. Okay, in Scotland, you can't go anywhere you want, can't tramp over people's fields and gardens. It's a right of responsible access, which must be exercised in Ireland. Scottish out their access code. There's no right to gardens, schools, airfields, sports fields.

And importantly, land where crops are growing, and there are three key principles. Respect the interests of other people, care for the environment, take responsibility for your own actions. You know, don't go in someone's garden, don't travel on a farm as crops, don't leave litter, keep your dog under control.

Um, all of those things, right? And if you don't do that, you have no, you have no right to access. But I think we should have the same right to access that we haven't Scotland and I would for one, I think 500 million pounds a year for the whole country to be able to go, right? I'm going to walk around the margin of that field rather than being confined to that footpath that someone has fenced off. You know, I think that's fair enough and that's a decent deal.

I quite like that, yeah. I quite like the sort of rules. It sort of almost treats us like responsible adults. As long as you treat the land with respect, I like that. Now, Crane is back on the case. This week, it's all about businesses refunding items to old vouchers. But what if you've chucked them out? Helen, explain this story. I wanted to get this story out before Christmas because

I think people who buy vouchers, obviously very well-meaning. It's a nice gift, but there are so many things you can bore foul of. Personally, not a fan of them. Some of them have restrictions. They obviously can go out of date. People leave in the drawer and forget them. And also, as I found when this reader wrote in this week, you

and chuck them away and then end up not be able to get a refund on something you've bought. So what happened was she, this was the start of last year, she got these love to shop withoutches for Christmas, head to Argos, bought a coffee. Explain the love to shop there where you can shop at lots of different places, is that right?

Exactly, so they're these multi-shop vouchers. Those are the similar ones, I think one for all, and a lot of shopping centres do these vouchers where you can buy things in all the shops in the shop and say it's based on a multi-source store voucher. You can spend it in lots of different places. So she had to argue, put herself a nice new coffee machine, all good, used all the money on the vouchers, and then obviously got rid of them.

Everything was fine until a few months later, the coffee machine was faulty, so she took it back to Argos. No problem, gave her a refund. But then she realised that the money never went back into her bank account. It was only then that she remembered that she paid on these vouchers. And when she looked into it, it turned out that the money had been sent back onto the vouchers. Obviously a problem because she drained them and threw them away. So the reason that that can happen

is because these love to shop vouchers and the other similar vouchers, one for all the shopping center vouchers, they're actually not really vouchers at all. What they are is essentially a repaid cash card. So personally buys them loads of money onto them, you spend it, but then your account essentially remains open until the expiry date, which I think is normally

one year, and you can't top up the voucher again so you can't use it as you would another cash card but it sort of stays active until they expire. So what happened was when she took the machine to Argos for the refund, they as they normally would when someone's paid on a card they just refunded the money back to the same card that she paid on.

So she's obviously without her, without her money, she looks into it with our gosh, she calls them five or six times saying, please, can you help with this? Can you, you know, could you just give me the money in cash? And they said, no, we need the serial numbers from the vouchers.

if we're going to be able to refund you. She also goes to love to shop and says, anything you do about this, could you issue me another voucher? And again, they say, no, you need these serial numbers else. We can't do it. And on the receipt, it only has the last word digits of the serial number. As it would, if you paid no normal college, no, it doesn't show you.

and the whole card number. So she's sort of stuck with this money on a voucher that she sort of can't retrieve, obviously quite irritating. So she got in touch with me. I went to Love to Shop and to Argos and actually quite a nice outcome. They actually both agreed to reissue a voucher. So Argos gave her a £50 voucher, a suggestion of Goodwill and Love to Shop also.

reactivated sent her new vouchers so she's now up by 100 quid which is good news for her however i think it's a real sort of cautionary tale for people who who get given these vouchers and people who give them as well so i think it's always a good idea if you're giving someone a voucher do note down these serial numbers or if you receive one just take a picture of the card so you have it in your wallet you know you have the serial number you have a record of it because you never know what's going to happen um the other thing to know about some of these vouchers is that

If you leave money on them and they expire, then you can be charged a fee every year to keep money, unused money on the card. So you love to shop charges, I think, £11 a year for unused money. Yeah, £11 a year.

Obviously most people don't realise because if you've forgotten about the voucher for a year, it's quite likely you'll never remember about it again and then you'll just realise and you've lost the money. I should say the money doesn't go, it doesn't take any more money past the balance on the card so you couldn't be sort of in debt to your love to shop value.

It is pretty sneaky in my opinion. Also, you can, on these cards, you can get your money back in cash while the card is still within its exporter if you want. However, there is £8.90 fee. So for me, it's just a note of vouchers for me. I know people think that it's a bit more personal than giving cash and you put a bit of a thought into where people might want to shop, but for me,

If you don't want to give people cash and they'd take them off lunch or, you know, I just need vouchers or two. It's just a huge win for shops, I think, because so many vouchers end up not being spent. And that is 100% profit for the shop. I just handed them over cash and they have given you nothing in return. I mean, this is why shops love to sell people vouchers. They sell them.

with the hope that they'll never get spent and they've just been handed a bunch of cash for absolutely nothing. That's just my opinion, you know, other people feel obviously differently but I'm personally not a big fan of the gift voucher at this time of year.

No I think if ever I was to give a gift voucher it would have to be for something pretty established and I'm thinking and there are other stores obviously something I would use would probably be M&S everyone gets their pants from M&S boots classic and maybe like a coffee shop voucher stick it in a mug don't get signed in a coffee shop voucher because he will not be grateful for that those love to shop vouchers

are supposed to be a really good solution for, you know, lots of different shops, etc. But they're the only ones I never really use and I had no idea I've never heard anything like this of you.

I have come across it before when I've written about other stories about vouchers. But I think it's something that I try and mention every Christmas because I think some people really don't realize. And actually, it's not always just people gifting to each other. These types of vouchers are very often bought by companies for their staff as an end of year bonus or an end of year gift. So it's, yeah, it's quite a quite big business for them, I think, is this all staff perks.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, nice to get 25 quid from your work or whatever, but just make sure that you remind people to actually spend it. I recommend if you are giving people a voucher, writing a note in the card saying, just so you know, this expires, maybe set a note in your phone. I just hate the idea of, you know, just handing over money to companies that is never ever spent.

Yeah, quite. Right, Simon, podcast, reader, question time. You've teed it up. The kinks have been ironed out. We've got to read a question. The one that we read out wins a mug. Have we got the mug, Simon?

The mugs are winging their way towards this is money towers where they will be checked for quality such as this is money and podcasts being spelled correctly and the handles not falling off then they will be sent to our winners of the question of the week.

Marvellous in due course. In due course, perfect. So the winner of the, this is money, hopefully spelled right. Mug is Connor for his email about retirement planning. So Simon, you'll take this one. The question is, when retirement planning, I'd like to calculate how much I need saved in my stocks and shares, I said,

to act as a bridge before I draw in my pension. How can I best calculate this so that I know when I can pull the trigger on my last day at work? What a great image there. Thank you and congratulations on your 10-year anniversary of the podcast. Thank you so much, Connor. Right, Simon, do the honors, if you would.

It's a great question. It's that kind of like, what's your number question, isn't it? You know, what's my number? What do I need? What's my FU money? That's finishing up money, by the way, for anybody wondering what I was talking about there. Right. So the way to think about this, I would say, is to do

your own version of what a financial planner would do. And what they do is they do this cash flow modeling thing. And they look at, you know, kind of how much cash you need, basically. So to keep for your living expenses and all the things that you need to cover. So if you look at the point where, so, you know, Connor said, my last day of work, so if he's going to go, right, I'm not going to have to work again after that, you then go, okay,

What are my costs at that point? How much is life going to cost me at that point every year? And then I can work out how much I need to cover it. And there might be things in there that, for example, you don't have to pay for anymore. So if you commute by train to work and you're paying thousands of pounds a year for that, you can knock that one out. Many people will tie this kind of ambition in with their mortgage finishing or something. So can you take your mortgage out of the equation?

your pension. Now there's a question, are you going to continue paying into a pension or are you going to treat this as the point where you stop paying into the pension? But also on the flip side, if you're not at work, what are you going to be doing? Are you going to have other costs that are going to come in?

For example, maybe you are planning on having some finishing up money because you want to travel or things like that. What's that going to cost you? How are you going to fund all of this? So what you want to do is like map out all of those things and work out right roughly every year, I'm going to need this. And then you look at your stocks and shares, I said, and you go, okay, I've got this pot of money here. Is it going to cover that?

Now, there's two things to think about here. Are you going to try to roughly maintain the value of that stocks and shares, Isa? So you're only going to want to take a natural yield. So for example, typically when people do retirement planning, they're talking about 4% a year. So obviously you then need to multiply your annual income by 25 and have a pot that's that big. And that's going to be massive.

Or are you happy to run that down? So for example, take the situation where someone might be 55 and they plan to retire early and they need to get through to 60 when they can get their workplace pension and then they need to get through to 66 or 67 when they can get their state pension. You map out those milestones, you go, okay, how am I going to do it? And then you also need to leave a buffer because what if things suddenly get more expensive?

What are your essential spending and what is your discretionary spending on top of that? You can always knock out some of your discretionary spending. Don't make the mistake of thinking you can knock out all of your discretionary spending, but the essentials, they matter back to a conversation about inflation and stuff getting much more expensive.

And that's how I would sit down and work out the number myself. That's not the magic formula for being like, okay, Connor, here's your number. But it's all of those things. And that is the sort of thing that somebody would do with financial planning.

Um, and actually on that note, what I would say is, uh, Charles Stanley direct who are the sponsors of this podcast. They do free 15 minute, you know, financial coaching conversations and like with something like this, you know, it gets you, you know, 15 minutes where you can ask a financial planner about that kind of question and they'll give you an explanation of the kind of things that you need to think about. So it is, it is worth thinking about doing something like that.

Yeah, indeed. Right. Good question. Simon, how can listeners get their questions in? You can email us at podcast at thisismoney.co.uk and please put question in the subject line. Now, Simon, time for your start of the week. This week is a very quick start of the week.

Bitcoin is up 45% since Donald Trump's election. It's quite a lot. It's been knocking on the door of $100,000. It hasn't managed to break $100,000 at the point of recording this podcast. And when I say knocking on the door, it has been trading above $99,000.

Anybody tempted to whack a load of money into Bitcoin needs to be aware that it is highly volatile and there is every chance that it might hit $100,000 and then absolutely plummet just as much chance as it might continue going up. So do be wary, but yeah, 45% rise since, you know, new friend of the crypto bros Donald Trump got elected.

Good stuff. Right, that is it. You can keep up to date with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. And if you have any comments or questions to the team, anything you'd like them to look into, Simon? You can email us at podcast, thisismoney.co.uk. You can tweet us at thisismoney or come to thisismoney.co.uk forward slash podcast to find all podcast pass and join the debate and read the comments.

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