We recently applied for a loan through Sainsbury’s Bank. The only reason we picked them over our own bank was because according to some loan comparison websites, they were in the top three for offering the best APR (as the image to the left suggests 7.8%APR). Obviously this depends on your circumstances but still, it was worth a try out.

FairInvestment.co.uk said the following about Sainsbury’s Bank.

Advantages of a Sainsbury’s Bank loan include:

• Easy to apply and you’ll get a decision in minutes.
• Choose a repayment period to suit you.
• Protect your personal loans against the things that worry you.
• Apply for an instant personal loan online today.

It might be easy to apply for a loan, but you most certainly DO NOT get a decision in minutes.

There are over 7 pages of forms to be filled in and each form is on a timer, so if one takes to long filling in the information, the page times out and you have to close down the browser window and start again.

You DO NOT get a confirmation email letting you know the application is complete, nor do you know when the decision will be made.

After 3 days I decided to call Sainsbury’s Bank to find out if they had received our loan application, having heard nothing, received no emails, or had any left messages for us. After 12 minutes of hanging around on the phone I finally got through, only be asked a whole bunch of similar questions as the original application. Once I got through those I was told the loan application had been denied. The gentleman on the phone could NOT give any explanation as to why the loan application had been denied and that was that!

What a waste of time?

Further more I got an annoying email today from Home Shopping Personal Finance who got my details from Sainsbury’s Bank, even though I opted out of Sainsbury’s Bank passing on my details to a 3rd party company. They had the cheek to tell me Sainsbury’s had denied my application for a loan. No sh*t Shurlock.

Suffice to say I logged into my online bank at Lloyds TSB and applied for the same loan amount, didn’t have to fill in forms etc and within 5 minutes had the loan approved and the money in my bank account and at a better APR than Sainsbury’s Bank was offering it.

The moral of the story – Stick with the banks you know, give your own bank a chance before looking for cheap alternatives. Cheap is often expensive in the long run. There are advantages to using your own bank namely;

• Your bank should know you and your credit history,
• Your bank has all your information already,
• Your credit history is already known,
• If your loan application is accepted, payment into your account can be instant.

It’s less than 4 days to go until the Bon Jovi concert at the O2 arena in London and we have not yet received our tickets. They were ordered through GETMEIN! seven months ago, yet they are telling us that we should expect to receive the tickets 2 days or 1 day before the event. All because there has been a promoter problem. Is this acceptable? What if we was travelling from another city, does that mean we have to delay our trip until the tickets have arrived? It seems insane! Of course phoning the number provided on their website only gets an automated response.

It’s one of those situations that is almost out of our hands. GETMEIN have our money and all we can do is hope and pray we get the tickets before Friday. It is a major FAIL for GETMEIN!

“giffgaff – the mobile network run by you”, according to their website. It’s a great concept whereby you can earn cash when you  bring others to giffgaff. The idea is appealing especially if you own an unlocked mobile phone and don’t want to be tied to a contract and/or use more data/texts than actual mobile calls. They offer some cool packages which are very visible on their website under the name “goodybags“. (see below – images from the giffgaff.com website).

So naturally this is something that I would consider, as I am “more” a data/text user than a phone caller.

So I signed up for the FREE sim. The sim card arrived in a timely fashion in the post in a very simple piece of paper folded in a way to look like an envelope as to not waste paper. (very green indeed, very clever). Once unfolded there was a small credit card size piece of plastic holding the sim card. It was wrapped in a cardboard sheath that showed off their logo and tag-line on the front and on the back the same price schemes for the different goodybags. So far so good.

I went to the giffgaff.com website and clicked on the Activate SIM button and was prompted for sim card code and various personal details and then it showed the following screen, which has intrigued me since this is the FIRST TIME that it tells you what you can do:

1) What would you like to buy? (I want to buy a giffgaff £10 goodybag).

• Buy credit (why would I want to do that if the £10 goodybag already contains 100 minutes)?
  or
• Buy credit & goodybag (I don’t want credit when the £10 goodybag already contains credit for 100 minutes).

Which brings me back to my subject that giffgaff is misleading us. No where on the site does it say you have to purchase credit before you take on a goodybag.

Even “This bit’s important…” doesn’t state that clearly enough.

edited 07/06/2010: After some clarification in my comment area from other people, I am happy to strike out the paragraph below because I have misunderstood giffgaff on what they are offering and giffgaff themselves have confirmed the clarity of the process is not very clear and will make the necessary changes to resolve this.

In a nutshell I could have purchased “credit only”, e.g. £10 and with that money purchase a £10 goodybag. If I managed to use the 100 minutes up then I would have to top up by buying more credit.

Activating with a goodybag would make more sense as there are less processes to follow. Let us wait and see if giffgaff make the process clearer.

The whole concept is a good deal if you have “only the goodybag” as shown on their website and on the packaging of the SIM card, but a rip off if one has to add “a top-up” ON TOP of the goodybag. I say “rip off” because the only saving grace between the package I am on now and giffgaff is the fact that I am tied into a contract for a year, other than that my current package with T-Mobile gives me 500 minutes, 600 text and unlimited Internet (1GB limit as per acceptable use policy) and all for £15/month with the option to bolt on extras per month, which is a better deal than giffgaff are offering.

edited 07/06/2010: I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Perhaps I have totally misunderstood giffgaff. I have posted a similar question on twitter to @giffgaff and you are welcome to comment on my post or in twitter: @lookatbowen

note: screenshots were taken using my own screen grabbing software from the giffgaff.com website and are used as reference purposes only.

Newzbin is no more after losing a battle with the courts. They have now been put into administration because they couldn’t pay their debts. I always said the subscription to the site was too low. It was ridiculously low (as in £2 for 8 weeks worth of downloads).

Word is that they owe the Motion Picture Association (MPA) £230,000 just in interim costs, and that’s without a full costs ruling or a decision on damages. Apparently they also owe a software development house over £500k.

Newzbin is one of the original Usenet indexing sites and the creator of the immensely-popular .NZB format, which opened up simplified Usenet downloading to the masses.

While the major BitTorrent sites were in Hollywood’s spotlights as the major source of copyright infringement, Usenet sites such as Newzbin remained untouched.

This changed, however, when the MPA, the MPAA’s big brother, sent a threatening letter to the site’s operators in 2008.

This letter was followed by an official announcement of a lawsuit against the Usenet indexer early 2009. The case eventually went to the High Court in February of this year where Newzbin was found liable for copyright infringement.

Let’s hope a clone site can open in it’s place soon else websites such a Giganews and Grabit will suffer as a result.

Hey David, Gordon and Nick!

I hope you guys are reading this? If you want my vote, here is what you need to do?

You need to stop families  like the Daveys from claiming benefits and having loads of kids, when they can clearly can’t afford them.  They are taking over £40,000 in benefits or hand outs each year and neither work for a living. That is wrong in every sense of the word. To make matters worse Mrs Davey is pregnant with her 8th baby and doesn’t want to stop until she reaches 14.

Here is what Mrs Daveys had to say for herself…

‘It doesn’t bother me that taxpayers are paying for me to have a large family’

We couldn’t afford to care for our children without benefits, but as long as they have everything they need, I don’t think I’m selfish.

Most of the parents at our kids’ school are on benefits.

I don’t feel bad about being subsidised by people who are working. I’m just working with the system that’s there.

If the government wants to give me money, I’m happy to take it. We get what we’re entitled to. I don’t put in anything because I don’t pay taxes, but if I could work I would.’

It’s so unreal, words fail me! No wonder this country is in the state that it’s in. No wonder kids have no respect (most likely they come from a family like the Harveys) and hard working people get screwed over in every sense of the word!

There should be some system in place that stops parasites like this from breeding further. A simple check such as:

1. Do you have a job Y/N?
2. Can you afford a family Y/N?
3. Do you have a house paid for by youself or family Y/N?
4. Have you already got kids Y/N?
5. If so how many – 1, 2, 3?
6. If greater than two and you have answered “N” to all of the above, then sorry you will be sterilized and your benefits will be closely monitored, and even removed if you are proven to be capable of working.

So there you have it Gordon, David and Nick. If you want our vote this year, then please let me know which one of you will stop this kind of abuse taking place. I don’t really care who started this ridiculous benefits system, I just want it changed and if neither of you  can stop this, then I think it’s time for Mrs B and myself to quit out jobs and go for the baby record of United Kingdom while racking up credit card debt and demanding better council housing. I fancy a 4 bedroom house in Kensington!

Read about these people over at the Daily Mail. The article is titled “Why work when I can get £42,000 in benefits a year AND drive a Mercedes?”

Please Note: It is in my opinion that people who are able to work and choose not to because the benefit system is more lucrative for themselves are “parasites” to society. It is also my opinion that people who are on the benefits, living in a council house and having kids for the fun of it are also “parasites”, because hard working people are paying a lot of tax only to support these lazy, inconsiderate leeches.

I also realize the fault lies at the hands of the government, since they were the ones that put a silly system in place without much thought of the consequences, as weak individual / people would inevitably abuse it if given the chance.

I recently upgraded my T-Mobile contract to a Sim Only deal where by I get X amount of minutes and X amount of voice calls and unlimited internet usage.  I took this option because I bought my phone outright.

T-Mobile were very quick to point out that the “unlimited internet usage” was not actually unlimited but instead capped at 1GB.

How ridiculous?

Ridiculous for many reasons as the phone I recently purchased is totally geared towards the Internet and for social networking (Skype, Gtalk, MSN, Facebook, Twitter, has a full internet browser, access to everything internet related). The Nokia N900 is a mini computer or tablet device with a phone function.

The Nokia N900 is not the only phone offering such features, there are many other phone makes (Blackberry, Apple, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, LG etc) and models offering fast download speeds (7.2MBit, 10MBit).

T-Mobile bragged that they were streaks ahead of the other mobile ISP’s because they offered 1GB instead of 500MB. All very well, but that is a pathetic statement to make!

I consider myself a heavy Internet data user on my mobile and by that I mean:

1. The Nokia N900 is a multi-tasking device, therefore it is possible to open multiple web sites in the real internet browser, which is similar to what you would find on your desktop PC, and it is able to load up all the graphics, video and sounds that are normally present on a website quickly, which obviously uses a lot of data. I regularly browse;
   1. BBC, Sky News, Engadget, Wired, Netvibes, Youtube, Wilkinsonsworld, Crunchvictims, FT, CMAVision, Gmail,  etc.
2. On top of that I would have open Facebook, an online scrabble game,
3. Multiple Twitter accounts,
4. Last.FM scrobbler, or Shoutcast music streaming, or E-Book reader,
5. I am downloading a few podcasts on a daily basis,
6. Reading and replying to my various Email accounts,
7. Instant Messaging through Skype, MSN, GTalk and Facebook (all possible in one place on the N900),
8. Blogging on my various websites,

I had a look at my data usage after a week of using the Nokia N900 and it’s up at 450MB. (Doh! after a week). There is no way on earth the 1GB limit is going to last me. I will reach that cap by the end of next week!

T-Mobile already offer broadband via a USB Dongle. They are quite generous in the amount one can download with their USB dongle (£ 10/mth – 4.5 Mb/s  – 3 Gb cap). – Check out wifi.co.uk

What they need to realize is that with the new mobile technology coming out with bigger and better devices with lovely large screens and qwerty keyboards, that devices such as the N900 are similar too and / or if not better than a netbook or a laptop with a USB Dongle, since they incorporate the internet technology in the device.

For a Sim Only contract with unlimited Internet at a cost of £15/mth, one would expect T-Mobile to offer a larger download limit!

Come on T-Mobile, please review your Interet download policy!

Above is a recent order from Play.com – I bought my wife a Sony E-Reader PRS505 digital reader for her birthday in September. (look at the price then).

Look at the price today 2 months later. Yup, almost £100 more expensive. Christmas is just around the corner and PLAY.com have decided to RIP OFF GREAT BRITAIN!

Play.com – You guys should be ashamed of yourselves. How you can charge this much money for an old device is beyond me? I was blowing your trumpet not so long ago, but I can safely say I will NOT be shopping at PLAY.Com from this day forth!

Arriva runs this bus service called Fastrack in Kent. Since we dont live near the station, the only choice is walking down a disgusting road full of air pollution or risking life or limb around all the works that litter the pavements.

The service Its is not exactly FAST either, as their name suggests. We often wait an extra 10 to 15 minutes because the bus either missed its slot or didnt bother to turn up.

They recently put up the price of their tickets and for a local bus service outside of London, their prices are ridiculously expensive. £1.60 for a single and £2.60 for a return. It is daylight robbery.

The most obvious thing that Arriva or Fastrack have failed to notice, is that their fancy large bus is not full. If they reduced the prices perhaps more local folk would use the service.

Posted by Wordmobi

Grrr, no Matter box again today!   How very disappointing Matter.co.uk?

To show my disappointment I came up with some extra words to the song “No matter what”. I hope you like it!

No matter what (Warren@Matter.co.uk) tells me.
No matter what they do (comment, email and make more promises and excuses).
No matter what they teach us (Matter teaches us to hate Royal Mail and to wait patiently for little boxes).
What we believe is true (Yup Matter & Royal Mail screwed up my delivery).

No matter what they call us (desperado’s for waiting a year for a box of ????)
However they attack (well they emailed me at least 4 times over the year promising a box of matter)
No matter where they take us  (yeah! they take us as fools).
We’ll find our own way back (I won’t be finding my way to the Matter.co.uk site again).
I can’t deny what I believe (The matter box is not going to arrive through my letter box).
I can’t be what I’m not (well I won’t lie, the box never arrived and that is damn annoying).

I know I’ll love forever I know, (well I certainly won’t be loving the matter box).
no matter what…

Oh well, no review of the matter box, so instead here is a cheesy video of Boyzone singing the above words in black.

Related Posts: Where is my Matter box?

Yup you guessed it, yet another false start as my Matter box did not arrive as planned on the 6th of December. It is clear that the Matter teams confidence is let down horribly by the people who are delivering this product to the chosen ones.  No surprises then when I read it’s Royal Mail.

Fortunately I didn’t sit around waiting for the box to arrive as I have better things to do with my life.

Just like the hard drive that was meant to be delivered on Friday before 12pm from Ebuyer.com (another company that make promises they cannot deliver on, hence the reason this will be the last time I ever purchase stuff from them again). They even sent a sob letter apologising for the lack of delivery. Again, I am quite sure Royal Mail had something to do with it.

The only thing going for the Matter box team is that I have yet to purchase anything from them.