New price comparion site launches in Germany (icero.de)
Icero.de
launched its new price comparison website today (15.10.2007).
The offering currently includes price comparions for a number of finance
products including car insurance, unsecured loans and mortgages. 
Icero.de, latin for "bulls eye", not the oldest town in Holstein, is part of Britain's leading price comparison website moneysupermarket.com.
Icero.de has arrived in Germany with precision timing as most car insurance policies start at the beginning of each year and can typically be cancelled with a month's notice. This means that everyone who wants to change their car insurance next year has to do so by 30.11.2007.
A full press release (currently only available in German) announcing the launch of icero.de has been provided by fischerAppelt Kommunikation.
3rd interest rise this year (2007).
Today, 05 July 2007, the Bank of England increased the base rate again from 5.5% to 5.75%. This is another attempt to contain the risk of rising inflation and reduce the amount of people's borrowing.
This is good news for savers and homeowners with fixed rate mortgages that are not due to run out in the near future.
On a newly taken out interest-only mortgage this means a monthly increase of £45.21 per month on a borrowing of £100,000 compared to December 2006. A repayment mortgage of £100,000 at base has increased by £62.50 per month compared to December 2006.
| Date | Base Rate | % increase |
| 05 July 2007 | 5.75% | + 0.25% |
| 10 May 2007 | 5.5% | + 0.25% |
| 11 Jan 2007 | 5.25% | + 0.25% |
Good news for savers and investers
is that Zopa, the
Ebay-style lending community was extremly quick to pass on
the benefits to its users.
Other banks and finance companies usually take weeks to pass on
the benefits of a rate increase to its customers.
Only 9 minutes after the announcement by the Bank of England today, Zopa sent out a notification informing its members that it is going to pass on the increase to holding accounts held by all of its customers.
This means that all money transfered into a Zopa lending account and waiting to be lent out or funds returned from Zopa borrowers will receive a higher return. As from 06 July 2007, all Zopa lenders will receive an amazing 5%pa while the funds are waiting to be lent out at an even higher rate of return (typically 6.75% but some lenders earn up to 14% pa before tax).
Why not give Zopa a try - their bad debt rate (this is where borrowers fail to pay back their debt) is virtually zero and Zopa will also give you £30 for free to try out their new approach of lending without banks.
Finance companies reluctant to pass on increase in interest rate
On 9 November 2006, the Bank of England increased the base rate from 4.75% to 5%. More than 3 weeks later one third of savings accounts providers still failed to pass on the increase to its customers.
ING
Direct, the Dutch financial services conglomerate announced
this week in their newsletter
that it is not going to increase its rates. This must come as
a surprise to all of its customers.
During the past 3 and a half years ING Direct has been trading in the UK it has been very fair to its customers. The ING Direct savings account is still one of the most straight forward accounts on the market. There are no hidden catches.
Other savings accounts such as First Direct's e-savings account also seems to remain at 4.75%. Compared to the ING account, a major downside with the First Direct savings account is that you loose a month's interest when you decide to move money out of the account.
View Best Buy Table at Moneysupermarket.comFind out what the neighbours paid - Yahoo! House Price Centre
Yahoo! has launched a new service on their finance web site which allows you to see what houses actually sold for in England, Wales and Scotland.
The information is reproduced with permission from the Land Registry. The date range covers the period from 1 April 2000 to 27 February 2006.
The site lets you search for houses by postcode or even partial postcodes, street name and / or town. If you just want to have a nosy then you can browse properties by location.
In order to see the results you will have to type in a 5-character security code shown in an image. This is to stop other people stealing this information from Yahoo!.
Once you entered the code you will get a list of all houses matching your criteria. The details returned include the full address, house type (Flat, Terraced, Detached, Semi-detached, Freehold, Leasehold etc), date sold and most importantly the price the house sold for. This is the ideal tool to sneakily undercutting ridiculous asking prices.
Other clever features of the site
are a graph showing average house prices in that area over the
past 12 months and a map showing house prices in the area.
Yahoo!
House Price Centre
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