Property

The next time you can’t afford to put petrol in the car or groceries on the table – and you happen to have an eight year old living in the house – you’ll know who to turn to for a loan. Or at least that’s the unintended conclusion of a recent survey of First Communion costs by the popular social media site for...

PART 2: It has taken a long time for the Central Bank to intervene in the mind-numbingly complicated way that private health insurance contracts are sold and presented to individual customers. Hopefully product choices will be simplified and br made more accessible when the Bank finishes its review. Older readers...

This month last year an important personal finance decision had to be made by tens of thousands of adults over age 34 who were not already owners of private health insurance: “Do I bother to take out a policy, even one of the low value, low cost, hospital cover only ones or do I take my chances as an entirely public...

Enhancing a pension income is a tough task these days: banks offer middling to nil interest on savings. Investing requires time and a strong nerve and access to professional, impartial advice if you are to avoid high costs and charges. And with unemployment still so high, not every older person has the energy or...

We know how important tourism is to the Irish economy. It employs hundreds of thousands of people. It is an all-Ireland industry, though Dublin gets a disproportionate number of weekend visitors. We’re fortunate that our ‘season’ begins around Saint Patrick’s Day and ends in October, but domestic tourists have also...

BW writes: “My daughter, who has a long, chronic psychiatric illness has run up approximately €9,000 in credit card debt which has only come to my attention recently. MABS has advised her and her options are to try and get a credit union loan, or from me. What do you think would be a fair repayment term and...

DM writes: “I am enquiring on behalf of my parents who are aged 79 and 77. They are looking to downsize their house, which has been valued at c€280,000 and move to a more suitable bungalow. The new property is selling for €140,000 and needs around €30,000 of work. They have savings of €80,000 and my...

As the election candidates and the parties come to terms with last Friday’s election poll results, whether by celebrating their victories or licking their wounds, the rest of us go about our daily lives. The impact of this election – how many promises are kept or discarded; how much extra or less tax we will pay; new...

Not everything is as it seems, especially when it comes to money and financial products. I was at a movie the other day and one of the pre-film advertisements was about the mortgage offer from Permanent TSB. Up there on the giant screen was a buy-now-pay-later offer of 2% of the value of your new mortgage as...

You need to be either very determined or very desperate to become self-employed in Ireland today. A couple of weeks ago RTE’s Liveline programme heard some pretty horrific stories from sole traders whose lack of access to the most rudimentary social welfare benefits like unemployment assistance or disability payments...