Humberts 01242 513439.These properties have been selected by The Week, the magazine that gives you the best of British and foreign media. Send a cheque for pounds 49.50 to The Week, Freepost (SWB26), Bristol BS12 0BR or telephone the credit card hotline: 0171-447 0016 Or order a copy from your newsagent.. WHAT do banks and building societies mean when they advertise savings accounts as “instant access”? Increasingly, the answer is anything from free and immediate access to your cash to accounts where it actually takes up to a week or more to access your savings, or where the size and number of withdrawals is limited, or where there is a charge for withdrawals. Last week the Advertising Standards Authority struck a blow for clarity. Following a complaint about Direct Line’s Instant Access account, where like most new phone accounts it takes, in effect, three days to get your hands on the cash (you need to transfer it to your bank account first), the ASA said the “instant access” description should be qualified.
The specific ruling was against Direct Line, but the ASA said it was likely to take the same view with other phone accounts as well as many traditional “instant access” postal accounts, where it can take more than a week to access funds.This last point may explain why the building societies, now so keen to prove their customer service credentials, have not tried to capitalise on Direct Line’s knuckle-rapping.Despite the ruling, for many people the new generation of telephone savings accounts will work out as convenient as branch-based accounts while paying much better rates. By contrast, no society has yet launched a high-paying phone account. The best they’ve offered to date is “instant access” postal accounts, and presumably they would rather keep as quiet as possible about the time taken to access savings from these.SOME Barclaycard customers are about to get a better deal, though even more would get a better deal by switching cards.

Barclaycard is cutting its interest rate for those spending pounds 300 or more in a month, and cardholders who spend pounds 5,000 or more a year will have the pounds 10 annual fee waived.If you spend more than pounds 300 in a month the rate drops from 22.9 per cent to 20.9 per cent, if more than pounds 500 it drops to 18.9 per cent But these rates are still not cheap. Cardholders who want to borrow can get a much better deal elsewhere – try RBS Advanta’s 7.9 per cent fixed until January 1999; call 0800 077770.For those who pay off bills in full each month there are cards with no fee whatever you spend, combined with more tangible spending rebates – try Goldfish, 0345 609060, or Alliance & Leicester Money Back, 0500 838383.MANY of Britain’s biggest mortgage lenders are dropping mortgage indemnity guarantees for a number of borrowers. Since they cost upwards of hundreds of pounds and give no benefit to the borrower, the moves are welcome. Once again, not a single big building society is among the modernisers..

RANGING from Manchester United to Beirut casinos, leisure companies are an oddball grouping of shares and have given investors an appropriately roller-coaster ride. The rise and fall of football club shares since 1996 is just the latest in a string of spectacular corporate comets that have fallen to earth. The history of Brent Walker, built up by former boxer George Walker, should be a warning to any company contemplating massive acquisitions in today’s overheated stock markets. With an empire ranging from dog tracks to the Brent Cross shopping centre in north-west London, Brent Walker’s undoing was the massively over-priced pounds 685m acquisition of William Hill, the betting shops chain, in 1989. By December 1993 the group had clocked up losses of pounds 1.2bn.

The shares, which peaked at over 400p, dived and have now been delisted.
Football is a different vale of tears. Probably uniquely in the stock market, it is a sub-sector driven almost entirely by private shareholders Most of these punters are fans, not investors “Rather than buying a scarf, they buy some shares. Whether the shares are pounds 2, pounds 200 or pounds 2,000, the price is not what they are interested in,” says Nick Batram, football clubs analyst at stockbrokers Greig Middleton. “People tend to ignore the management or the profitability of the clubs.”Instead, football shares still have a tendency to soar or sink on a Monday morning depending on the team’s weekend performance. Fine if it is a crucial match, such as last year’s defeat of Sheffield United by Crystal Palace, which kept the northerners out of the Premier League and cut United’s share price by 30 per cent at a stroke. Much less easy to understand if it is just one of the many other games played during a season.It is now obvious that football shares were bid up far too high since relatively few clubs cash in on the huge new revenues coming into the industry The disparity is huge.