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Take a tip from the expert who always provides value for money
IF Martin Lewis had his way we'd all come out of the pod crunching APRs, understanding every impenetrable syllable of small print on mortgage interest and able to spot a loophole in an insurance document at 100 paces through fog.
At a very tender age Lewis (born in Manchester, raised in Cheshire) liked nothing better than doing difficult sums at lightning speed. It was a pastime he enjoyed with a similarly anorak-ish uncle and my, how
the hours must have flown by. It was clear that he had an instinctive, even wizardly, connection with numbers.
And lo, he was recently dubbed "the Dumbledore of Debt" by one journalist who was obviously in thrall to that wisest of wizards, JK Rowling's headmaster in the Harry Potter books.
Without meaning to, I'm sure, this financial savant makes you feel a complete half-wit and slouch if you don't shop around for everything from plane tickets to restaurants to utilities, and approach every transaction with healthy cynicism.
If you want to know the nitty-gritty on water meters, he'll
spout the lot; on credit card shuffling, and even how to make money out of them, he is without peer; when it comes to fighting back against bank charges, he is the only man to talk to. But more of that later.
He's a rich man these days, but you won't catch him without a
wad of money-off vouchers to help him choose where to dine, and it's one of his ambitions to make it so cool for a man to carry discount vouchers that women will think him unattractively foolish and profligate if he doesn't.
Some might say "tightwad"; but he'd see you five and raise you 20 when it comes to playing the system. He'd also ask what's clever about paying the menu price unnecessarily, and cheerfully remind you to inquire what the restaurant does with the tip.
But it's more than a dazzling way with numbers and an innate understanding of money that make Martin Lewis tick. He could, after all, have helped himself to millions in bonuses alone as a hedge-fund manager or dealer in the City.
He certainly had the talent and the contacts, and even worked in the City for Brunswick, until realised he was "on the wrong side" on the day he was told by the boss that he was in line to become the youngest ever partner. "I decided to get out before I was paid too much to leave. My family tried to talk me out of it, but I wanted something more fulfilling."
The son of a headmaster of a special needs school, a London School of Economics graduate and highly-trained and experienced financial journalist (Consumer Journalist of the year, 2009) – including a period as money man on Radio 4's Today programme – he has found his real calling as a people's champion and financial enforcer.
The website moneysavingexpert. com, which he set up at a cost of 100, has in six years become a phenomenal mine of up-to-the-minute information on good deals, and an advice point for those who seek to make their money go further with the help of Lewis and his team of 25 brighter-than-bright maths, finance and trading standards whizzes.
Wary of his integrity being compromised, he doesn't allow companies to advertise on the site and doesn't favour one financial organisation
over another. He makes money by a trade-off with "affiliate
links" to finance comparison websites.
The site has attracted more than eight million (one in four British adults) this year, nearly four million people are fans of his monthly Martin's Money Tips and a million receive his weekly email bulletin cram-packed with the latest money-saving offers and advice, covering everything from discounts on your favourite crisps to consumer protection law. It's all about cutting your bills without cutting back, he says.
He receives about 5,000 emails a day from people who are worried about debt or other financial problems, but he stresses that he's not a
personal finance adviser, and there is no substitute for good
one-on-one advice from an independent debt counselling service. He stopped using the Tube because so many desperate people begged him
for help he felt he wasn't legally in a position to give.
The success of the site has meant he is in demand everywhere, with regular TV and radio slots and national newspaper columns. He works
a 60-70-hour week and that, you suspect, doesn't include the work-related chat and interviews slotted into every available second as he runs or rides back and forth around the capital.
He's called upon to give the "punter's view" on personal finance issues, whether on impending VAT rises or the safety of gift cards versus cash (cash is safer). In the run-up to Christmas last year, he was the most searched-for individual on the internet,
ahead of Barack Obama and Leona Lewis.
Last month he suffered one of his few setbacks when a case brought by the Office of Fair Trading to win compensation for millions of
bank customers who'd been charged unauthorised overdraft penalty fees was dismissed by the Supreme Court. The OFT had launched a test case against eight banks (Abbey, Barclays, Clydesdale, HBOS and Lloyds (now merged), HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Nationwide.
The case was supported by Martin Lewis, who offered consumers free template letters on his website, which they could download and send to their banks to ask for refunds.
In three months, there were 850,000 downloads, and by summer 2009 six million people had used them. The banks moaned that Lewis was
promoting a compensation culture, but Lewis answered that he was simply helping people to reclaim money that was "lawfully theirs".
The mantra of moneysavingexpert.com is "consumer revenge", and
its attitude is that we should beware because the corporate world is out to get us. Since the court's ruling, he has been looking for other legal avenues to pursue, and is by no means finished with the banks.
Advice from a top QC has convinced Lewis that the onus is still on the banks to prove the charges are fair rather than on the consumer to demonstrate that they are unfair, but the OFT is now deliberating whether to take further action.
"The question is whether (the charges) have to be fair," says
Lewis. "People shouldn't plan on getting their money back, but I would still say there is a 20 per cent chance of a refund."
Martin Lewis, who says he has been slightly in debt for only one day in his life, has been accused of being the only man to have benefited from the recession – which he thinks is a little mean, seeing as the growth of the website has not been quite as phenomenal this year as in 2008.
"I'd be happier for the recession to be over and for people to be happy," he says.
"Most debt is not about big spending, but about divorce, losing a home or job or a death – changes of circumstance. I'm not particularly a reader of the financial pages; the reason I'm interested in personal finance is because it's about real life actions and how money affects everything from relationships to lifestyle and mental health."
He's 37, and can't see himself continuing forever at the same frantic pace, or doing the same job in 10 years' time. He has set up a mental health foundation and is a governor of the LSE, where part of his mission is to help to educate the young about finance.
"We have deleted the stigma of debt without realising the consequences. Debt is seen by the young as acceptable and normal. We've educated them into debt, and now we need to educate them about the difference between good debt (student loans, for instance) and debt they can't afford, accumulated on cards they won't repay for years."
Lewis isn't a great fan of Christmas, but he does think the best present we could all give ourselves is one day a year spent overhauling our finances – with the help of the money makeover mechanism on his website.
"It'll be the best day you've ever spent, looking at what you pay for everything and what kind of better deals are on offer. You can save 2,000 in a day by playing the system, paying less for everything and finding pain-free ways of saving."
Martin Lewis might sound on paper a little like Scrooge's younger brother, but he quickly convinces you that cleverness with money is an attractive form of nerdiness. He has nothing against enjoying life's luxuries, either – but when he and his wife, Five TV's weather
presenter Lara Lewington, stay in a five-star hotel he enjoys it all the more knowing he's found the best deal. "I have nothing against generosity; what I dislike is frivolous and unnecessary waste of money."
To use a phrase that's very dear to his heart, Martin Lewis is very good value.
www.moneysavingexpert.com
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