Website Of The Week – This Is Money
‘This is Money’ is the new website from Associated New Media, the new media publishing division of the Daily Mail & General Trust, owners of The Daily Mail and The Evening Standard. It bills itself as ‘your personal financial advisor’ and is targeted straight at the money-loving heart of Middle England, offering advice on everything from pensions to mortgages to savings and back to pensions again.
The design welcomes you like a suburban dentist’s waiting room, all tasteful cream and muted blue. The visual reassurance is needed, for the words are frightening enough: ‘endowment plan’, ‘the 54 rates of personal taxation ‘, ‘top saving rates’, and dozens more phrases all carrying reminders of things you ought to have organized by now, but haven’t, or ought to organize better if you have.
The occasional graphics are there for decoration more than use, and certainly wouldn’t distract you from the important matter of finding out how to make your money become more money and score one over the neighbours. What might distract you, though, is the time it takes to find anything. The ‘mortgage calculator’, for instance, is hidden in the Toolbox, and that’s in the top left hand corner, while an interesting piece on the worst 50 peps is under ‘the dog list’, under ‘PEP centre’ under ‘Saving and investing’ To be fair, ‘This is Money’ isn’t aiming to give instant information to casual readers, but to help people through complicated financial decisions ,therefore, it assumes that its visitors will be willing to spend time searching for exactly what it is they’re interested in.
However, they are trying to draw in readers who aren’t interested in personal finance, and to offer some light relief to those who are. As in all cases when money-men try to be entertaining, this leads to odd attempts at amusing pieces : you get to find out about Darren Knowlton, who ‘insists he has no time for girlfriends or evenings out. He is far too busy cataloguing and dusting his collection of Cabbage Patch Kids, or reading about an obscure Swedish car’s auction valuation, to judge the pros and cons of buying the largest house in England.
This is probably the weakest section of the website : there hangs over it a miasma of desperate sub-editors hunting around for material, and not coming up with anything much.
So, it’s probably not worth checking out ‘This is Money’ for a laugh or for mind-opening ideas. What it is very good at is giving advice for the financially illiterate. There’s a definite focus on explaining things very slowly and simply, and to its credit, it manages to be clear without being patronising. It translates tax jargon, describes exactly what an ISA is and what to do with it, tells you how best to repay your mortgage, and generally hands out perfectly solid advice on how to get the most out of investing and borrowing.
Nothing all that exciting, perhaps, and certainly nothing that would surprise an accountant, but in a market where even Richard Branson can pose as the saviour of confused investors and not be laughed at, there definitely is a need for impartial advice. I imagine that ‘This is Money’ is likely to be of immense use to confused savers and worried borrowers, and come the dreaded day when I have take out a mortgage, I’ll probably consult it myself.
Of course, some of you may have occasionally suspected The Daily Mail and The Evening Standard of a slight political bias, and that suspicion would be confirmed by this website. ‘This is Money’ reveals that the ‘mind-boggling complexity’ of New Labour’s tax regime ‘threatens to cause enormous difficulties for individual taxpayers’ and will bring joy to the faces of those leading figures of contemporary demonology ‘ tax accountants’. Generally , the site seems likely to yearn constantly for the wise guidance of Margaret Thatcher.
In conclusion, ‘This is Money’ is rather a good website, slightly boring, but very useful.