Posted on February - 06 - 2012
Owning a home has become considerably cheaper than renting one over the past three years, according to a study by Halifax.
Research from the building society found homeownership was more than £100 a month cheaper than being a tenant in December 2011. The average cost of buying a three-bedroom house in the UK cost £600 last month; some £116 (or 16%) lower than the average monthly rent of £716 paid on the same property type, according to the Halifax report. Three years ago, the average cost of buying was 29% higher than renting.
In December 2008, a three-bedroom property would have cost the average homeowner £928 a month in mortgage payments, while a tenant would have needed to find just £721 to cover rent on a property of a similar size.
The remarkable turnaround has been driven by a sharp fall in the cost of mortgage payments and soaring rents in the private sector. The monthly cost of buying a home has fallen by more than a quarter since 2008. New m
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Posted on January - 30 - 2012
When it comes to taking out an insurance policy for your business, the most vital one is public liability. Businesses of every size and shape need it, no matter how much it costs. However, the public liability insurance cost is negligible compared to the amount you may have to pay out should an accident happen on or near to your premises.
The size of your business determines how much your public liability insurance policy is worth. The value of cover varies between £1m and £10m, but it’s not just the price that’s vulnerable to change. As a result, many business owners choose cheaper policies, but they don’t always get the best deal.
The main reason why some policies are less expensive than others is because they are less inclusive, and offer less cover. It might be worth comparing two different policies in the same price range, as one could offer you considerably greater value for money. Upon ta Read full post…
Posted on January - 29 - 2012
What goes up must come down: we learned that in science class. Too bad that same logic doesn’t apply to credit card interest rates. Annual Percentage Rates continue to climb high. According to data from Credit-Land.com, a leading credit card research website, the average APR is now 14.94%.
That rate percentage is the highest since 2007, when the company began tracking the data.
While the rates remain at an all time high, they have been stable for the majority of this year. In fact, the national average has only gone up from 14.71% to 14.94% since the begging of this year. A reason for this could be that credit card issuers are no longer trying to maneuver to adhere to the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which required lenders to restructure the whole way that they presented credit cards to borrowers and the fees that they could charge borrowers.
“These high rates are more than likely the sign of our troubled American economy,” said Arnold Taubman, chief economist at Credit-Land.com. “Our e
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Posted on January - 25 - 2012
In the past two decades, Medicare’s administrators have conducted demonstrations to test two broad approaches to enhancing the quality of health care and improving the efficiency of health care delivery in Medicare’s fee-for-service program. Disease management and care coordination demonstrations have sought to improve the quality of care of beneficiaries with chronic illnesses and those whose health care is expected to be particularly costly. Value-based payment demonstrations have given health care providers financial incentives to improve the quality and efficiency of care rather than payments based strictly on the volume and intensity of services delivered.
In an issue brief released today, CBO reviewed the outcomes of 10 major demonstrations—6 in the first category and 4 in the second—that have been evaluated by independent researchers. CBO fin
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