Spending money on holiday can be an expensive business - the problem is you often don’t know how much you’ve been charged for those cash withdrawals from the hole in the wall until you get home. Typically you get stung twice - first with a transaction charge (why?), secondly with a poor exchange rate. Alternatives to now have been travellers’ cheques (a nuisance to change and not very flexible), or changing all your money before you left home (not a good idea to wander around Naples with a thousand euro in your back pocket. The new generation of currency cards is a much tidier idea, and the FairFX.com currency card
is hard to beat.

Here’s how it works. The FairFX.com currency card is a debit card, but one you charge up with currency before you leave home. You can get one for euros or US dollars, and it will cost you £9.95 to sign up (though moneysupermarket.com are doing a deal where you get the card free if you sign up before 31 August. FairFX says it delivers savings of 10 per cent against cash bought from a bureau de change and 5 per cent against ATM withdrawals or buying things on your debit or credit card. Cash withdrawals cost €1.50 or $2. Another bonus - exchange rates are fixed when you load the money on, not when you spend it, so you can lock in a good exchange rate if you’re smart on your timing.

The reason we like it is that FairFX says it aims to undercut major rival CaxtonFX at all times. Not written in stone, but the FairFX.com currency card is certainly cheap compared to the competition, some of whom run rates of 4 per cent. Of course you could get burned by exchange rates turning against you, and note that the money on the card doesn’t earn interest, so you’re losing on money that could have been ticking up interest on deposit. Beautifully simple and secure though, chip and pin protected, and a good option for youngsters setting out on their gap year travels perhaps?

‘The base rate is five per cent and likely to fall…’ So starts the sales pitch from Landsbanki of Rykjavik for its one-year fixed rate Icesave savings account, fixed at a very interesting 7.01% AER for a year. Whether the base rate will fall from 5% is open to conjecture of course. The Bank of England was split down the middle on base rate during May 2008 and decided to leave interest rates unchanged. And a rise in interest rates is the Bank’s only real tool against rising inflation of course, and as we know inflation is creeping worryingly toward the 4% figure. But … this is a terrific rate of interest, and largely fuelled by the Credit Crunch. Banks are so short of cash that they are having to offer increasingly good rates of interest, well above the Base Rate, to entice us to deposit with them. And Iceland’s banks, heavily leveraged and so with little reserves of their own, are desperate to get more cash in the vaults in order to keep liquid and keep trading.

All of which may start to ring some alarm bells … could you be investing in a bank that’s likely to go bust? Martin Lewis of moneysavingexpert.com has some useful observations On the Icesave account, (don’t worry about the fact the post was on April Fool’s Day!), and suffice to say it’s well worth sticking a few grand away to get this very good rate of interest. If you are committed to regular, keep your paws off, saving, then this is a good place to start.  The Icesave account pays 7.01% a year, or 6.79% if you take interest monthly, and Moneyfacts made the account a Best Buy at the end of April.

Check out our previous Financial deals of the week here.

I’m not a big drinker myself, recent heroic boozing episodes include having a half glass of champagne at my son’s birthday party and having to retire to sleep it off (and there’s no way you should be going to bed before the six year olds is there). But I understand that for many of you a meal isn’t complete without a little something to wash it down. So, the perfect accompaniment to dinner, lunch, breakfast, or indeed a packet of crisps in the park, the once ‘reassuringly expensive’ Stella Artois hits new price lows with an offer of Cheap Stella Artois at Morrisons supermarkets this week.

Here’s the deal. Morrisons has a 24-pack of Stella Artois 440ml cans at just 44p a can. You’ll need to be quick as the offer is in stores only until Monday 26 May and is limited to six cases per person. A perfect time to stock up on supplies for those summer barbecues I should have thought. And the obvious ploy here, if you go shopping mob-handed with the family, is to get all of them to buy their allocation. I reckon this one is going to sell out pretty damn quick so stock up now on you cheap Stella Artois at Morrisons.

Morrisons gets an honourable mention as just about the cheapest of the UK supermarkets by the way (I know I will now get hit with data from Tesco and Sainsbury’s proving that they are cheaper for eggs, bread, falafel and whatever, but my experience of Morrisons, which is largely in the north of England, is that they’re startlingly cheap). We’re sure as grown ups that you DON’T have to be reminded to enjoy alcohol sensibly, but we’ll drop it in anyway. As well as cheap Stella Artois at Morrisons, Check out some of our previous ‘financial deals of the week‘ here.

Laptop computers under £200? Impossible I would say. In fact, show me a laptop computer under the £200 mark and I’ll show you a child’s toy. But there’s a certain irony here. Supercheap laptop makers Asus has pitched its Asus EEE computer at children. And there are certain refinements you’re not going to get on a sub-£200 laptop computer. No DVD player, and no big screen – the EEE has a 7inch number that is never going to compete with the whizzy Apple numbers.

I’m not going to go into too much technical detail on the Asus EEE and its stable mates, I’ll leave it to the computer journalists to tell you about the RAM, USBs and the rest. But what interests me is that a bare bones laptop, ostensibly aimed at the play room, can become a superb workhorse, allowing you to run your spreadsheet software, do your household accounts, access your online bank account, and the rest. All this from a laptop computer under £200 – I’m impressed.

In fact, while the Asus laptops retail for a little over £200 (the discount online stores are knocking out the EEE for around £210) anyone registered for VAT, will actually be picking up an Asus laptop for something like £178. A complete ‘no brainer’, as computer type people have an unfortunate habit of saying. In fact, you could dump the old home office set up and thus free up a room, your office being where your laptop is. This laptop computer under £200 could definitely save and make you money long term as you get your finances onto the PC and thus organised.

Read more of my financial deals of the week, Asus Eee PC 900 suppliers

Tags: Eee PC, Asus Eee PC, EEE-PC

Petrol prices in the UK have been going only one way over the last few months. Conversations in my house tend (rather monotonousl) to have followed the pattern ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever got £50 worth of petrol in the car’, to be followed swiftly by ‘That’s the first time I ever got £60 worth of petrol in the car.’ With that in mind I paid a visit back to Petrolprices.com to see how much difference it could actually make to my weekly fill up. Petrolprices is a typical Web 2.0 interface, the classically Google-simple front page simply offering a large type-in box where you enter your postcode. Register, the work of moments, and you are given the five cheapest filling stations for your unleaded, diesel, premium or whatever.

Now Ive been slightly sceptical about fuel price comparison sites in the past. The way I buy buy petrol is 1) I notice I’m low and 2) pull in at the next filling station. The idea of driving out of my way to get to a cheap petrol station (thereby using petrol notice) has always struck me as counter productive and distinctly ungreen. I’m also wary of becoming the sort of middle-aged man who obsesses about petrol prices and discusses them with his workmates. Such conversations often continue with the relative merits of leaving the M6 at Junction 5 or Junction 6. But with local variations from 105p a litre up to 118p, I’m saving around £6 a time on each fill up. Using my unreliable maths, I work out that the additional driving I’m doing is costing me 30p … though is it worth an extra 30 minutes of my time to drive there and back? A complex sum which you’ll have to do for yourself.

Incidentally, a quick look at the petrolprices.com blog (I kid you not) reveals the usual litany of ‘NuLabour are a bunch of thieves’ and ‘this country is finished, I’m moving abroad’ complaints, so I’ll not be lurking there for long. But petrolprices gets an honourable mention as this week’s financial deal of the week.

My financial deal of the week is credit card balance transfers. There’s no argument that the credit crunch is making it harder than ever to borrow money, be it mortgages, on credit cards or personal loans. And many of the best credit card deals (long-term O% on purchases and free balance transfers) have been quietly withdrawn by lenders. But if you know where to look there are still good deals, and one of the most lucrative involves ‘churning’ your credit card debt. In simple terms, switching it to a NEW credit card.

A year ago, you could have done this free of charge, so desperate were the banks to lend us all money, but typically now there is an arrangement fee, usually around 3%. However, compared to the 15% or so many of us are paying on our monthly credit cards, that’s a tiny price to pay. One of the best deals just now is the Virgin credit card which is offering 15 months free credit on balance transfers, with a 2.98% handling fee. Transfer in a balance of £10,000 off your old card and you will, therefore, pay a one-off £298. HSBC’s credit card meanwhile is offering a 13-month deal, but the handling fee is just 2.5%, so we’d say it’s worth going for that one in anticipation of looking for a new deal when that expires.

As ever, you shouldn’t see this as free money … the whole point is saving money on the interest but remember that the capital sum still has to be repaid sometime, so you should use the cards for your regular spending, rather than racking up new debts on luxury purchases. Enough of the lectures though … they are a great deal if you can get one.

Okay, each week I’m going to be plucking a plum financial deal from the monetary cybersphere that I think subscribers and readers to Walletwatcher should be getting into. Sometimes they’ll be excellent savings accounts, sometimes a particularly interesting credit card deal, and sometimes a source of free money or other giveaways … hard to believe but yes they are out there. But this week, being a once-a-year occasion, the end of the financial year, there are some particular things you should be looking out for. Our financial deal of the week is ‘ISAs’. Yes all of them. If you did nothing else you should ensure that you have used your ISA entitlement as it’s one of the very few tax-free savings vehicles UK Government gives you. If you have no idea how they work or even, shamefully, you’re not entirely sure what an ISA is, then read my idiots’ guide to ISAs. Okay, I’m assuming you’re back now, suitably fired up and with your credit and debit card at the ready, so where do we start?

With shares looking very volatile just now, cash is looking safer than ever before, but that doesn’t mean you should be earning zero interest on your ready money. There are some excellent deals on cash ISAs just now, with some of the banks and building societies offering rates north of 6.3%, and these could look even better with the Bank of England set to cut the base interest rate still further this year. Watch out of course for conditions on whether your ISA account is fixed or variable rate. Check out more cash ISA best buys here. The other type of ISA is of course the share ISA, and it would be foolish not to use your allocation … providing you’re investing for the long term. Even the most volatile of markets shouldn’t be a problem for a broad basket of stocks held over the long term. Check out share ISA providers here.