Want £1 per week for life?

jimjames

Anyone want to apply for £1 per week for life?

Saw this old paper from 1931 today. Pretty dramatic demonstration of the impact of inflation over long periods and why cash savings long term are not advisable.

eskbanker

...and that's still a better return than some cash ISAs!

Gromitt

jimjames wrote: »

Anyone want to apply for £1 per week for life?

If so, contact the Halifax, which will give you £1.44 per week for as long as you deposit £1000 per month into their Reward account. Of course you'll need to remove tax from that, so the end result will be currently £1.15 or £60 per year, unless you are on higher tax brackets.

Ifts

Gromitt wrote: »

If so, contact the Halifax, which will give you £1.44 per week for as long as you deposit £1000 per month into their Reward account.

I thought the Halifax Reward account only required a deposit of £750 per month (obviously plus the 2 DD's) to qualify for the reward payment.

shireknight

Yeah but what is a 1931 £1 worth in today's money?

Edit: Hmm £55 according to this website http://safalra.com/other/historical-uk-inflation-price-conversion/

~Chameleon~

Gromitt wrote: »

If so, contact the Halifax, which will give you £1.44 per week for as long as you deposit £1000 per month into their Reward account. Of course you'll need to remove tax from that, so the end result will be currently £1.15 or £60 per year, unless you are on higher tax brackets.

I earn more than that in my Nationwide Flexdirect account. Average £9-£10 a month.

bowlhead99

~Chameleon~ wrote: »

I earn more than that in my Nationwide Flexdirect account. Average £9-£10 a month.

Well yes, I earn more than that from my £X0,000 of fixed interest investments too. The more money you have and the highest interest rate you can find, the more you can make.

Gromitt's point was you can basically have Halifax give you over a pound every single week (as per headline) without actually needing to have any real money on deposit with them. Once you meet the T&C by depositing at least the minimum at some point in the month, they'll pay you the cash even if you only have a few pounds average overnight balance for the year.

While by contrast, you need to give up the returns on £2500 of savings and investment opportunities elsewhere, to get your pretax tenner or less a month from Nationwide; same concept with TSB, Lloyds, Santander and the other ostensibly 'high interest' current accounts. For some people, Halifax are actually giving well over 100%...

wary

Back in the 1970s, when I was a kid, I remember entering a Walkers Crisps competition which had the same prize (I think) ... and £1 was a lot of dosh in those days, especially to a schoolboy. Not sure if I was being a bit naive though, thinking they may award it to someone who had most of their life ahead of them when they could award it to an OAP on their last legs instead.

jimjames

shireknight wrote: »

Yeah but what is a 1931 £1 worth in today's money?

Edit: Hmm £55 according to this website http://safalra.com/other/historical-uk-inflation-price-conversion/

It would be interesting to know the equivalent today.

I don't think a paper would sell more copies now offering to pay someone £55 a week.

JohnRo

I'm suspicious of official inflation figures, applied retrospectively just compounds that distrust.

It'd be interesting to know what equivalent every day items really did cost back then. Difficult to find the right items to make any sort of objective comparison though since the world then was very different in so many ways.

Glen_Clark

JohnRo wrote: »

Difficult to find the right items to make any sort of objective comparison.

The biggest cost to most people is the cost of housing, which the Government excludes from their inflation statistics.
Why are we paying battalions of civil servants to produce statistics we can't trust.