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You should not always opt for the cheapest travel insurance you can find. Consider what might lurk in the small print. One insurance-industry insider told me he would always buy travel insurance from a big-brand company because they will not want the reputational damage of refusing a massive claim for someone who falls ill, whereas some little fly-by-night company that can quickly change its name may be less reliable when it comes to meeting an obligation.

there is a strong argument for moving away from cash savings towards investing in the stock market, which generally produces a greater, inflation-beating return. This is only really suitable if you are prepared to lock your savings away for at least five to ten years. I explain in the next chapter how to go about investing for this longer term. For shorter-term savings, cash wins, but you need to give a bit of thought to where to put your cash to minimize by how much it may be eroded.

The Rental Exchange scheme records your rental payments and sends the results to Experian. You need to actively sign up to do this by paying your rent through a company called Credit Ladder, which then passes on your money to your landlord or letting agent, so run this past your landlord to check that they are happy with it first. Equifax and Callcredit don't yet consider rental payments.

You might be taken aback to learn just how expensive pension benefits are as we all live longer. In the financial year ending 2017, the UK government spent PS264 billion on welfare, which made up 34 per cent of all government spending. Of this welfare budget, PS2 billion - that is 1 per cent - was spent on unemployment benefit, PS111 billion - 42 per cent - was spent on pensions.

Defensive shares are shares in companies that do well even when the economy does not, things that people always need, no matter how much money they have - companies that produce pharmaceuticals, or food, or energy.

Stamp duty This is the biggest cost of moving, a tax you pay on any property you buy in the UK. The tax is based on the price of the property you are buying, and is staggered in thresholds. For example, you pay 2 per cent of a property's value on properties priced between PS125,001 and PS250,000; 5 per cent on properties worth between PS250,001 and PS925,000; 10 per cent on properties worth PS925,001 to PS1.5 million.

Personal loans are more expensive than the best credit cards on the market, but you can usually borrow a bit more with a personal loan, so it depends why you need the cash.

All credit cards will set you a time frame in which you can repay your outstanding balance in full without getting charged any interest. For most, this period is a month. Watch out: usually you get charged immediate interest on any cash withdrawal you make on a credit card at an ATM. Never use your credit card for cash withdrawals if you can help it.

A landlord can end your tenancy without reason - outside of the fixed period - but needs to give you at least two months' written notice, and provided that your leaving date falls at least six months after your original tenancy began.

A variable rate is fairly self-explanatory. The mortgage lender sets the price of its variable rate and may at any point raise it or lower it; variable rates will rise when the base rate rises, but banks may set them as they like. All lenders will have a 'standard variable rate' (SVR), which is their default product that you will revert to whenever the special deal you might sign up for, say a two-year tracker, ends.

The deadline for online returns is 31 January each year, so for example you would fill out a tax return for the year 5 April 2017 to 6 April 2018 by 31 January 2019. If you have a turnover of more than PS85,000 you also have to register for VAT.

Some wealth planners say that you should aim to have at least the equivalent of your annual salary saved for retirement by the time you are thirty, three times that sum by the time you are forty, eight times by the time you are sixty, ten times by retirement, in order to maintain your standard of living. Someone used to all the perks of a PS100,000 salary would need to have at least PS1 million saved to not feel poorer in retirement.

For us normals, tax 'reliefs' and allowances are in place to incentivize you to do certain things that society values: save for a pension, start your own business, get married, rear a child, cycle to work, drive a low-emissions car, donate to charity, rent out your spare room, or care for an elderly relative.

Shares may be divided into different categories, 'defensive' or 'cyclical', 'growth-' or 'income-'producing. These are based on the characteristics of certain kinds of company, what product or service it is offering, and whether it is more or less likely to be popular at certain times.

Your credit history is a record of your interactions with other financial companies: banks, energy providers and so on, kept by credit-reference agencies. Your prospective lender is looking for evidence of past borrowing behaviour to assess whether or not you will be a well-behaved borrower going forward.

Should you save in the Lifetime ISA instead? An alternative to a pension is the Lifetime ISA. This is a savings account to save for a first home and/or retirement, open to anyone under the age of forty. As with other ISAs, you don't pay tax on the returns on your savings. You can put in up to PS4,000 a year and will receive a bonus of 25 per cent - that is up to PS1,000 - from the government until you are fifty, or until you have used the LISA to buy your first home, whichever is sooner. You can use the money to buy a home worth a maximum of PS450,000, otherwise you cannot take it out before you hit sixty without losing your bonus and some, the equivalent of about 6 per cent of your total pot. This is more flexible than a pension, though, where you cannot take the money out at all before fifty-five. Savers have the potential to earn a total of PS33,000 in bonuses if they pay in the maximum PS128,000 from age eighteen until they turn fifty. Accounts can be held in cash, or stocks and shares. If you are a higher-rate taxpayer the LISA is not as generous as the tax relief you get on a pension, however.

The amount you can borrow in a mortgage is measured in a 'loan-to-value' rate, or LTV, as you will see on mortgage adverts. This is just the percentage mix of deposit and loan. If you had PS20,000 cash and wanted to buy a PS200,000 house, you would have a 10 per cent deposit, and need to borrow the remaining PS180,000 to get your hands on it. That is you need to borrow 90 per cent of the property's value, or 90 per cent LTV.

The fact that you accrue interest means that your loan will grow, which means it will take longer to pay it off. But most people will never pay it off in full within the thirty-year time frame anyway. However large your loan becomes - if it were to grow to PS100,000 with interest - you still only pay off 9 per cent above the threshold each year. That is why unless you are earning a lot of money you don't need to worry too much about interest charged, because you only pay off what you can within thirty years.

The standard variable rate (SVR) is the price of a 'default' tariff, which, as the name suggests, varies and is usually the most expensive deal. A remarkable number of people sit on these, 57 per cent of energy customers, according to uswitch, paying way more than they need to as the cost of energy creeps up.

Meanwhile, we are told that what we buy no longer defines us as it once did, ostentatious materialism is naff, and even the boss of Ikea says we've reached 'peak stuff'. But I am not convinced. All those authentic, social-media-documented 'experiences', insta interiors, travel and food porn invariably require cash. I often wonder how those part-time bloggers/curators earn so much, but they probably don't: they get their enviable lives subsidized by tourist boards or fashion brands that want the advertising.

A monthly credit-card balance below 30 per cent can gain you 90 points on your credit score, according to Experian, which scores from 0 to 999. A score of around 780 is fair, one of above 961 or higher is excellent. A card balance above 90 per cent will cost you 50 points.

Noddle lets you check your Callcredit score and is 'free for life'.

What people do not realize is that although debt is portrayed as something you should generally avoid, having no credit history is as bad as having a faulty one. Banks need something to go on.

You are also judged on things like how long you have been with the same employer, how long you have lived at your address, and how long you have had your bank account.

In the UK the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 (FTSE 100), for example, comprises the 100 largest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. The index rises and falls according to the share-price performance of the 100 companies listed on it. It is assessed every three months, and if companies' shares have underperformed they may fall out of the index and be replaced by another. Two or three drop out of the FTSE 100 every quarter. Companies currently in the FTSE 100 include Sky, Burberry, easyJet, ITV, Next, GlaxoSmithKline, Taylor Wimpey and Royal Mail.

A solid, straightforward option is to take out a personal pension with NEST. This is the National Employment Saving Trust workplace pension scheme created by the government when it launched automatic enrolment. It is used by many companies but is also available to the self-employed. It offers reasonable fees, which work out at about 0.5 per cent for most savers, you can view your account online, stop and start contributions and pay in with your debit card, or via direct debit. There are five funds to choose from, which vary depending on your appetite for risk and any ethical leanings. Another option is the online PensionBee which has annual fees of no more than 0.95 per cent, and you can easily manage it on your phone.

Personal loans If you need an injection of cash, to pay for a wedding, new car, new boiler, holiday, you might take out a personal loan. These are 'unsecured' loans, i.e. they are not tethered to anything like a house. A mortgage loan is 'secured' against your property: if you cannot pay the bank gets to sell your house as compensation.

A loaf of bread or tickets to a football match do not cost the same as they did in 1891. If you hold on to a PS20 note for forty years it will not buy you as much as it did then. Inflation is calculated in various ways, but the measures you are most likely to hear about are the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) and the Retail Prices Index (RPI). These are compiled by surveying the rising or falling cost of a basket of different goods and services. RPI and CPI record different things - RPI includes housing costs, for example - and they are calculated differently, so the rates are not the same. Usually CPI is lower and tends to be what is considered the national statistic of inflation.

Cyclical shares do better or worse depending on how well the economy is doing. Think banks (which suffered loads during the recession when people started withdrawing their savings, or could not pay their mortgages) or clothes companies (fewer people buy a new outfit when they are worried about their job situation, but will have a splurge when they get a bonus at work).

The first is that you probably want an income in retirement roughly equivalent to half or two-thirds of what you feel comfortable living on at the moment to maintain the same quality of life. That is because most older people have paid off a mortgage and no longer need to cough up for children or childcare, commuting costs, or colleagues' leaving presents. This is looking a less accurate picture these days, though, with so many young people likely to be still renting into their old age, or paying off mortgages that they could not afford to take out until their forties.

State pensions are paid out of a compulsory tax you pay throughout your working life, known as National Insurance. If you do not pay enough National Insurance you do not get the state pension. Note, however, that this National Insurance does not go into an account that is left untouched until your retirement; it is added to the government coffers each year, like all other tax that you pay. That is why people refer to the state pension as a Ponzi scheme, which is where whoever owns the scheme generates returns for established investors through money paid by new investors. Your National Insurance is currently funding today's retirees' state pensions. If the government of 2050 decides to abolish state pensions just as I retire I will not be able to claim a refund on all that National Insurance I've already paid.

PensionBee is an online service that will find your old pensions and consolidate them into one of a choice of its investment plans, 'tracker', 'tailored' or 'future world plan', run by wealth managers BlackRock, State Street or Legal & General. All come with low fees and are super-easy to view and keep track of online or on your phone. You will also be warned if moving your old pension could result in large penalties or loss of any benefits.

Fixed rates do not alter with the base rate. You lock into a specific rate for a set period - two, three or five years normally, but increasingly ten-year fixed rates have come onto the market. Whether you go for a variable or a fixed rate comes down to how much you want to bet on base rates rising or falling.

The base rate is the national interest rate set by the Bank of England, and it is to the base rate that high-street banks and building societies peg their mortgage rates (as well as their savings rates,

The many other costs of buying a house When working out whether you can afford to buy you need to budget for all the many other unexpected costs that crop up along the way: stamp duty, legal costs, local authority searches, survey costs, mortgage arrangement fees, mortgage broker fees, buildings insurance, removal vans, and, only if you are selling too, estate-agency fees.

ISAs Pros Normally any interest you earn from your cash savings is taxed at the same rate as your salary is taxed. A cash ISA (short for Individual Savings Account) is a type of cash savings account that allows you to earn interest tax-free. (You can also save into a stocks and shares ISA, more in the investment chapter.) When interest rates are so low, and savings sums small, taxable interest does not usually amount to much, PS2 on interest of PS10, for example, but if you are saving a large sum, for a house deposit, for example, it can add up. You can save in easy-access or fixed-rate ISAs. Cons ISAs have an annual limit on the amount you can save into them, which usually changes each year, but it is generous: PS20,000 in the tax year 2018-2019.

You can't touch this pot until you are fifty-five. At that age you are free to do a variety of things with it: take out all of it, though this is inadvisable, as it will be taxed heavily; take out a bit of it at a time or take out a quarter of the whole pot, on which you will not pay tax, leaving the rest invested to hopefully grow.

At its most simple therefore, a private pension is really just a tax break, or what is known as a tax 'wrapper' - a bit of jargon meaning something you wrap around a variety of different products to protect it from tax. The product is most commonly an investment fund, where your money (hopefully) grows by investing it in the stock market, but you can hold other things in a pension, like cash, or commercial property.

You can find old pensions you have lost track of using the government's pension-tracing service (gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details), a database of contact details for past and present pension schemes.

If house prices tumble, as happened after the financial crash, you could end up in 'negative equity', that is where you owe the bank more in a mortgage than your house is actually worth, and you will not be able to move, becoming what is known as a 'mortgage prisoner'. Falling into negative equity is less likely than it was, because since the credit crunch banks are much more cautious about how much money they will lend to you.

Damage by Default: the Flaw in Pensions Auto Enrolment,

Cycle-to-work scheme You can save as much as 42 per cent, for higher-rate taxpayers, and 32 per cent as a basic-rate taxpayer, on a bike to use for commuting to work via the cycle-to-work scheme. Your employer pays the cost of the bike and you pay your company back in instalments as a 'salary sacrifice', i.e. money that comes out of your gross pay automatically. That means you are not paying tax on it, unlike if you were to buy a bike out of your net pay. You can spend up to PS1,000 on a bike and equipment. Check out bike2workscheme.co.uk for more.

You may be on an emergency tax code. This often happens if your new employer does not have your P45. Most emergency tax codes end with M1 or W1, which indicates that you are being taxed monthly or weekly rather than annually, or maybe 0T, which indicates that you do not get the personal allowance because HMRC does not have enough information about your income.

PAYE stands for pay as you earn, and is the way you will pay tax if you are employed (for those that are self-employed skip on). Your employer will pay income tax and National Insurance to HMRC on your behalf before you receive your salary. How much that is is set out in your payslip, which is essentially a receipt for your earnings, income tax and National Insurance.

National Insurance is however 'pay as you go'. The contributions you pay are used to fund people needing state benefits immediately, so your NICs are funding your parents' and grandparents' pensions, not yours.

Higher-rate taxpayers who earn more than PS46,350 will also pay 20 per cent on the sum between the personal allowance (PS11,850) and the higher-rate threshold (PS46,351), but then 40 per cent on anything above that up to a maximum of PS150,000.

It is not just big companies that issue bonds, but governments, too, who need money to grow their countries, to build roads, railways, schools, armies. UK government-issued bonds are known as gilts, US government-issued bonds are treasuries. Bonds are also known as 'fixed-income securities', because when you buy one (or lend to a company) you know exactly how much money you are going to get in return for it on maturity: the interest payment or 'yield' is laid out at the beginning of the agreement. If you buy a bond with a value of PS100, a yield of 5 per cent, and a maturity of ten years, you will receive PS5 a year for the next ten years, a total of PS50, on top of your PS100 that you'll get back at the end of it.

And it seems that the same goes for other nations. In the first episode of the US podcast 'Bad with money', comedian Gaby Dunn approaches some young people in a coffee shop in LA and asks them what their favourite sexual position is. Without much hesitation one says 'Reverse cowgirl.' Gaby then asks how much money is in her bank account, and she says: 'Wow, yeah, I don't want to answer that one!' Too personal.

The vast majority of people in the UK pay tax at the basic rate, 81.8 per cent (or 25.1 million people) in 2017; only 13.7 per cent of earners paid higher-rate tax (4.2 million people); and just 1.2 per cent paid additional rate (364,000 people). The top 1 per cent of taxpayers had a 12 per cent share of total income, and were liable for 27.7 per cent of all income tax.

many taxes and reliefs apply to a specific year known as the tax year. This is not the same as a calendar year but runs from 6 April until the following 5 April.

You can also use the LISA to invest in the stock market. The LISA functions as an alternative to a pension: you can save into it for either a home, or until you are sixty, though you cannot deposit any new money beyond the age of 50. (More on using a LISA as an alternative to a pension in the pensions chapter). The downside is that, unlike the Help to Buy ISA, you cannot withdraw your cash unless you are buying a house, or until you are sixty, though, whichever is sooner, without being penalized by losing interest.

There are some funny VAT anomalies. For example, you do not pay VAT on cold takeaway food, such as sandwiches, but you do pay VAT on cold food like sandwiches that are eaten in, which is why you have to pay more to eat in in Pret.

In 2017 88 per cent of new car sales were funded using financing agreements. Most of them are not 'bought', however. The majority are actually just borrowing their cars and never own them outright, using deals called personal contract plans - PCPs. These are loans that help reduce the upfront cost of a pricey new car. The amount you borrow is based not on the full price of the car, but on the value of the car once the end of your loan deal is reached, usually after about three years, when the car has depreciated in price.

A tracker rate is a variable-rate mortgage, but one that is actually pegged to the base rate.