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	<title>CashQuestions Blog</title>
	<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/components/com_mojo</link>
	<description>A unique view of the world by the CashQuestions team</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:43:33 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>US mortgage repayments no longer sacred</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The American recession is changing one of the golden tenets of personal finance: keep paying your mortgage or you may lose your home.
Thanks to high unemployment and home prices that make it hardly worth selling, a growing number of US consumers are doing the unthinkable: paying their credit card bills instead of their mortgages. 
According [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,56/</link>
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		<title>Save our Savers: saintly, sinister or just silly?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A new pressure group has thrust its way into the headlines. It’s called Save our Savers, and, like Mom and apple pie, supporting savers has got to be a good thing.
This group is no building society members’ action group pressing for higher rates, or Low Incomes Reform Group seeking a better deal on benefits for [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,55/</link>
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		<title>Uncle Sam&#8217;s tough love</title>
		<description><![CDATA[America likes to boast about the virtues of the free market: stand on your own feet, be independent, lead your own life, no one to tell you what to do, land of the free and all that.
But when recession hits it is a lot harder for many people to do any of those things without [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,53/</link>
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		<title>A licence to print money</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Bank of England claims that British consumers are hoarding their cash – literally. In a speech in Washington, Andrew Bailey, executive director for banking services, attributed a shortage of £50 notes to the UK population’s distrust of the recession-stricken banking system and a preference for concealing what little cash they have left under the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,54/</link>
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		<title>Were SAMs really all that bad?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’m having some problems with shared appreciation mortgages.
No, I haven’t got one, but it’s the sums I can’t get my head round and why there seems to be a court case about them.
The High Court has just granted a Group Litigation Order to holders of these mortgages, who are suing Lloyds (which has taken over [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,51/</link>
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		<title>Why banks will never be the same again</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A mailshot landed on my mat today. It was from American Express, telling me that they were putting up their interest rates. Just to rub it in, penalty charges were going up too.
It sounded so straightforward that you could be forgiven for temporarily forgetting that we’re in the middle of the worst economic crisis in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,50/</link>
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		<title>&#8216;Caveat venditor&#8217; when Osborne&#8217;s new-style FSA takes shape</title>
		<description><![CDATA[George Osborne, the Tory shadow chancellor, caused a furore last week with his plan to abolish the Financial Services Authority. Less highlighted was his parallel scheme to bring the retail financial oversight of the FSA and the Office of Fair Trading into a new Consumer Protection Agency.
That will not hit the British public for several [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,49/</link>
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		<title>Tory plan: killing the FSA is only half the battle</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Conservative party has called for the abolition of the FSA, dividing its powers between the Bank of England and a new Consumer Protection Agency that would also take consumer credit from the Office of Fair Trading.
It will replace one mess with another. 
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne claims he would abolish what he calls a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,48/</link>
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		<title>What&#8217;s the matter with &#8220;setting off&#8221;?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A national newspaper has discovered an apparently secretive practice by the banks known as “setting off”. I don’t know what is secretive about it, as it has always been obvious to me, but I guess if people don’t read the contracts they sign up to then it may come as a surprise.
If you have been [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,47/</link>
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		<title>It&#8217;s time to means-test MPs&#8217; allowances</title>
		<description><![CDATA[“It is a progressive principle that we should do more for those who have the greatest needs. 
“So if we are to plan for the future, our priority cannot be that the wealthiest get exactly the same as the neediest. 
“A flat rate increase will not do enough to help [those] on modest incomes and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cashquestions.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,365/p,46/</link>
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