Firoz

Changed jobs a few times? You've probably got old workplace pensions you've lost track of. The free government Pension Tracing Service can help you find them. One pot makes fees easier to track, but some older schemes have guaranteed annuity rates you'd lose by moving.

Nearly 130,000 people reported Outlook, Teams, Word and Excel problems tonight. Microsoft says it wasn't extra traffic. Lots of its servers went down and pushed the load onto the rest. When your email, calls and files all come from one company, one fault takes out the lot.

Older people are leaving over £5bn a year unclaimed across just 3 benefits: 1. Pension credit: 900,000 households, £2.4bn 2. Council tax reduction: 1.65m people, £2bn 3. Housing benefit: 270,000 households, £1.3bn Only 62% of those who qualify for pension credit claim it, and it opens the door to help with heating and council tax too. Charities reckon full take-up would lift 280,000 out of poverty. Chasing one benefit at a time clearly isnt working.

Argentina has threatened the British boss of a Falklands oil project with jail. The Sea Lion field is meant to double the islands' GDP. Halliburton has already pulled out after talks with Argentina. Buenos Aires doesn't need to win in court if it can scare off everyone the project needs.

Nvidia shares fell 13% in early trading after Jensen Huang quit. It funds the data centre firms that buy its chips, and offered OpenAI cash to buy them too. Thats a lot of AI demand paid for with Nvidia's own money.

HMRC will never text or email you to say you're owed a tax refund. Any message that does is a scam however official the link looks. Same goes for calls threatening arrest unless you pay today. HMRC even has its own number for forwarding scam texts to: 60599.

Room rents in Stockport are up 10.4% in a year to £717 a month. Thats more than Manchester at £685. Where flatshare rents rose fastest: 1. Stockport, 10.4% 2. Gloucester, 7.7% 3. Warrington, 7.4% 4. Belfast, 6.8% 5. Edgware, 6.6% 6. Bracknell, 5.9% 7. Rugby, 5.4% 8. Basingstoke, 4.7% Across Britain the rise was just 1%. Moving out to the cheaper town only saves you money until everyone else does it too.

United says it won't let personal AI assistants book your flights. They can still show you United fares but can't complete the purchase. Its boss says he doesn't want "another middleman". Hard to sell AI agents that run your errands if big firms won't let them in.

Poundland has been given more time to find a rescue deal. Its owners want £30m for the chain. They paid £1 for it last year. One rescue bid was worth no more than half that, with under £7m up front. 600 shops are riding on which number wins.

On Monday Jensen Huang was expected to survive the Nvidia spy scandal. Then a second affair came out with an executive who reported to him. Today he resigned, 33 years after co-founding the company. The firm the whole AI boom runs on now has a stand-in boss.

Your workplace pension could soon pay performance fees outside the charge cap. The FCA wants default funds to be able to buy into private equity and private credit, where those fees are normal. Fine if the returns follow. If they don't, savers just end up paying more.

A £300,000 mortgage cost £1,569 a month in February. Now it's £1,763 at best. Rates on a 20% deposit went from 3.91% to 5.05%, and agents' sales outlook is the gloomiest since July 2023. With inflation expected to hit 5% next year, those rates could stay put for a while.

Under-25s look set to lose access to PIP and the health element of universal credit. A government review will reportedly put them on the basic universal credit rate instead, existing claimants and new ones. But the savings could take almost a decade to show up.

9 water companies were banned from paying bosses bonuses this year. Anglian Water still lined up "retention payments" of up to £800,000 for its chief executive. Ofwat is speeding up its review of the rules. If a fixed payment can replace a banned bonus, the ban was never doing much.

The UK economy grew 0.7% between July and September, the fastest in over two years. That's with petrol above £1.70 a litre and diesel close to £2. The Bank of England raised rates to 4% last week to cool inflation. Growth this strong makes an early cut harder to justify.

Sunday: Nvidia's board backed Jensen Huang. Wednesday: it reportedly met to decide whether to remove him. Shares fell more than 8% after hours, taking losses since the probe began to about $600bn. The whole AI industry runs on Nvidia and he has no obvious successor.

Paying for work stuff your employer doesnt cover? HMRC might owe you tax relief on it. Washing a branded uniform, some professional body fees and business mileage your employer only partly pays for can all count. You can also backdate a claim up to 4 tax years.

The US now pays more interest on its debt than it spends on defence. That's about $1tn a year, with total debt at $40tn, over 120% of the whole economy. Hard to see how the Democrats pay for their big new promises when the interest bill gets paid first.

Pay for your own care in England and youre charged on average 40% more than councils pay. The head of the independent review into social care says successive governments have been asleep at the wheel. Do you know how your family would pay for care if it came to it?

Scotland has 89,000 fewer social homes than it did in 1999. Its population has grown 9% since then. Over 19,000 households are now in temporary accommodation, including 10,715 children. Housebuilding has fallen 3 years running, so that gap isnt closing any time soon.