Life in United Kingdom

My bank has only one branch office in my city, and it's far away from where I live. So every time I have to take subway to deposit my wages that have been hidden under my pillow for weeks, the journey to the city centre cost me £2.80 for a return tickets. Yesterday, I passed the post office, noticed it have a free service to deposit and withdraw cash from many major banks, haven't tried out yet. Branch Banking Services at the Post Office : "It’s also free to deposit money into most major bank accounts at the counter in any of our branches" 'via Blog this'

First Direct promotion said get £25 for opening an account. Yet the terms stated opening an account simply meant putting in a penny. The angry bank closed the loophole within hours after 10,000 plus MoneySavers came from the weekly email, opened accounts, grabbed the cash then closed it.

"We had to pay tuppence ha'penny per week for our milk but it always seemed to be ice cold." Shirley Hitchcock wrote in her essay recalled her life in infant school in 1920s. Ha'penny means half penny, and tuppence is a variant of two pence. I have never seen a half penny coin. Nowadays, I see people throwing away one pence or two pence coin. When I send/pick up my daughter to/from school or take her for a walk, sometimes we may be lucky enough to find a coin on the road, and my daughter always feels very excited. Because she could save in her money bank and buy a roller skate for her next birthday. Her mum bought her roller skate for her 4th birthday, although she hasn't save enough money for it.

British Gas keeps bribing it customer by sending out a total of 52 million light bulbs. Of course we are happy seeing a package of four energy saving light bulbs sitting quietly outside our door steps, and I wonder if British Gas is a fool, or even a charity, because we use both their electricity and Gas, if British Gas keeps sending out energy saving light bulbs, its customers will use less electricity, and it will make less money. Look at these facts British Gas gives: Theses four light bulbs could save you around £18.50 a year. And if every one of our customers used them, enough energy would be saved to power over 150,000 homes for a year. But wait a minute, these light bulbs help reduce our bills and carbon footprint, this also means British Gas will lose 150,000 homes a year? But British Gas has very good reason to send out light bulbs without compromising its profit. Many other salesman knock our door to persuade us to switch to other suppliers. But if I keeps receiving those li...

A £28 annual fee appeared on my bank statement. This is the commercial credit card annual fee, but all I was told is my bank account is on free banking terms, no standard activity charges or account fees are payable. No similar warning with my credit card which comes with the current account. (Ah well, there are small prints on the back of the statement, I never read it.) The Office of Fair Trading ruled that any late payment or unauthorised borrowing charge levied by a credit card provider was likely to be illegal if it totalled more than £12. But last months the bank charged me £3.0 per day for overdraft. I asked for refund, and the banker did so. Some bank charge a fee when the card has low usage, either in terms of the frequency of transactions or their value. But my bank charges annual fee regardless of how many times you use your card. But the fees on credit cards need to come with a similar warning to those on packaged current accounts, i.e. the banker should have told me £28 an...

We use Severn Trent Water, It's reported that Severn Trent Water were fined £2 million for lying on water leaks, The water company reported an estimated yearly water loss of 340 million litres per day to meet targets, while the true figure was around 514 million litres (Is that a big number and a serious problem?). The reason they lied on water loss were to stave off having to carry out millions of pounds-worth of repairs until they could be covered by future water bills, and to avoid bad publicity. All homes in UK built since 1989 are fitted with water meters. But our house is older than that, it's more than fifty year old. It's an ex-council house, all houses in this estate were council house, most of them are still own by city council. they get conservatory fitted for free, or get wall and loft insulation for free, they can buy council house for a fraction of market price. Why UK government are so kind to their people? We asked our friend Peggy who has got a water meter ...