INSIDE MONEY: PROGRAMME 6: “FAIR SHARES”

Presenter: 	Lesley Curwen
Producer:	Jennifer Clarke

First broadcast	Saturday 24th August 2002 at 12.04 
Repeated		Monday 26th August 2002 at 15.02 

THIS IS A TRANSCRIPT OF THE LONGER REPEATED 
VERSION


Curwen:	Some have called it a bloodbath, others say it was a 
reckoning which was long overdue.  We’re talking about 
the massive volatility in the UK stock market we’ve seen 
in recent weeks and months.  Overall the value of many 
shares has tumbled and that means the worth of people’s 
savings, endowment policies and pensions has fallen 
very significantly.  The FTSE 100 share index has 
dropped by almost 40% from its peak shadowing a steep 
loss of confidence across the Atlantic on Wall Street 
where at one point the Dow Jones dropped 34% from its 
highest level.  In fact, stock markets first began turning 
sour two years ago, but no-one thought they would carry 
on falling for this long, or that we would witness such 
steep falls this summer.  The downturn came after more 
than a decade of rising share values led by burgeoning 
technology and internet companies.  In the late ’90s we 
all heard the heady talk of a new era, how the old 
economic cycle of boom and bust was dead and how in 
the brave new world company profits and share values 
would keep on growing. Here’s just a flavour of the 
excitement of those times when the only way was up.  

Voice:	“Since AOL floated back in 1992 the stock is up 
76,000%.”	

Voice:	“The performances have been staggering and they really 
are
	without precedent.  CMG, a well established company, 
up by very nearly 200% over the course of the year.  
QXL, much smaller, pure internet, but that’s more than 
trebled since October. Arm Holdings, that’s risen by 
nearly 1,000% since the beginning of 1999.”

Voice:	“Eight weeks ago I put £7,000 into the Aberdeen 
Technology ISA and 
	it’s now worth £10,500 which is an increase of 50%.  It 
seems like money for old rope, it’s the ’90s equivalent of 
the gold rush and I hope that it continues to rise.”

Voice:	“The old credo of buy low, sell high no longer applies, 
it’s buy high, sell 
	higher. I say there’s still plenty of gains to be made.”



Curwen:	That extract from a special edition of Money Box on the 
extraordinary rise of internet shares was recorded just 
ten days before the FTSE’s all time high, a shade under 
7,000 points on the 30th December 1999. After that, the 
only way was down.  Investors’ enthusiasm for 
technology and internet shares turned out to have been 
built on sand.  The truth was many of these companies 
never made a profit and that dragged down stock 
markets worldwide. Then we began to see a downturn in 
the American economy and in the rest of the world.  On 
September the 11th terrorist attacks in Washington and 
New York dealt a devastating blow to confidence and 
then investors faced up to a different kind of fear, that 
companies had been lying about how much money they 
were making. Last December, Enron, the giant US 
energy trader, collapsed and made accounting scandals 
and there was more to come this summer.

Voice:	“Share prices have fallen in London and New York in 
response to another 
	massive corporate fraud in the United States. President 
Bush has promised a full investigation of accounting 
irregularities at the WorldCom telecommunications 
company.” 

Voice:	“The impact on corporate America and the global 
economy will be 
	severe. The dollar has already fallen sharply overnight. 
Stock markets in London and New York can expect a 
torrid day.”

Voice:	“The value of shares has fallen sharply in both London 
and New York. 
	This afternoon the 100 share index fell below 4,000 for 
the first time in 5½ years.  The latest plunge, the biggest 
one day fall since September the 11th, came on top of 
falls in share prices every day last week, wiping more 
than 90 billion pounds off the value of British 
businesses.”  

Voice:	“If the stock market were a boxing match, the referee 
would have stopped 
	the fight today to prevent battered investors from taking 
further punishment. As share prices tumbled yet again, 
the city was gripped by unremitting gloom. London 
shares are now more than 40% below their peak.  The 
roof has not fallen in completely but there are big holes 
in the ceiling.”  

Curwen:	Since the worst falls in mid July, the footsie 100 has 
regained several hundred points but leading stock market 
historian David Schwartz says past experience suggests 
this bounce back won’t last.              

Schwartz:	Shares I expect will rise for the next year or two but a 
longer term trend, one that goes for say a decade, 
suggests trouble is ahead. History teaches us that there’s 
very very low profit odds in the decade that lies ahead.  
What this means is that somebody who can jump in and 
out can make money in the market but someone who 
cannot watch the market closely and jump in and out in a 
flash, the so-called buy and hold investor really has no 
business holding shares in the UK stock market in the 
decade that lies ahead.

Curwen:	Why not?

Schwartz:	Because the market is not going anywhere and the 
reason is we’ve had a huge price blow up in the 1980s 
and the 1990s and it takes a very very long time for 
shares to return to their historical average, and once they 
return to the level where they’re no longer inflated, they 
tend to drift for a while until investors, both institutions 
as well as private investors, start having the courage to 
jump in and these events take years to work their way 
out, it’s not a short period.

Curwen:	That’s bad news for people with pensions and any other 
share investments.

Schwartz:	Well it’s bad news if they’ve put their money in the 
stock market hoping for a re-run of the 1980s and 1990s 
because it’s highly unlikely for it to happen.  The basic 
truth of the matter is that the stock market rises about 
1% per year over the long run, much much less than 
what most people believe in and much much less than 
what we saw in the last twenty years.

Curwen:	So people’s expectations have just been wrong.

Schwartz:	Very wrong and it’s not just the little investor, it’s the 
institutions as well.  Every time you read an article or 
hear a speech it’s always inflated expectations about the 
future. I really believe the market is going up in the year 
that lies ahead, but I also believe it’s not going to stay 
up.  I think there’s going to be ebbs and flows with a lot 
of emphasis on the downside and it’s a risky place for 
somebody to be putting the bulk of their retirement 
money.

Curwen:	And this doom and gloom about shares is worrying 
ordinary investors. In many ways we’re the ones who 
own the stock market.   Our pension funds and savings 
are its life blood. This disillusionment has been a 
running theme this year.  The listeners who’ve helped to 
make Inside Money have told us they feel let down. The 
plunge in shares which underpin their investments has 
had a serious knock-on effect on their savings. Take 
Richard Uff who is so frustrated with potential returns 
from his personal pension that he wants to buy a 
property to let instead. He’s worried about whether his 
pension money is safe.       

Uff:	With the highlights of WorldCom and Enron having just 
hit us all, one is obviously asking well, how many more 
out there? I’d much rather trust my own instincts to use 
my money than let somebody else who’s just playing a 
game with it really. They don’t know me and I don’t 
know them and they don’t have to answer to me either. 
So I like the idea of making my own decisions with my 
own money.



Curwen:	And listener Tony Abramson joined us to find out why 
he lost 90% of the money he put in shares of split capital 
investment trusts, a loss of £18,000. He’s angry that 
what was sold as a relatively safe investment turned out 
to be something quite different.

Abramson: 	What’s happened is instead of getting the low risk 
investment I’d asked for, I’ve ended up taking a massive 
gamble, a gamble  I had no idea I was taking.  I feel as 
though I’ve entered a casino, it’s something I’ve never 
done before and I feel that some croupier somewhere is 
making the rules without explaining them to me.

Curwen:	Finally, Neil Wilkinson was facing a £17,000 shortfall 
on his endowment mortgage. He now wishes he’d never 
got involved in the stock market. 

Wilkinson:	I didn’t want to be an investor, but I don’t see what 
choice I’ve got.  I feel fairly powerless. I think the fund 
managers just do what they want.  If they tell investors 
exactly what they’re doing and what risks they’re taking, 
then fair enough you’ve got the option to move it, but if 
they don’t tell you what they’re doing, then how can you 
be said to have accepted what they’ve done.

Curwen:	So a common theme among our listeners. They’re all 
disgruntled and dissatisfied with shares. With all this 
fear and uncertainty, should anyone be investing in the 
stock market. Joining me to discuss this is David 
Kauders from Kauders Portfolio Management; Brian 
Tora from Gerard’s Stock Brokers; from the Consumers 
Association, Mick McAteer; and Christine Farnish, 
Chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds, 
who was formerly the Financial Regulator at the 
Financial Services Authority.  

Curwen:	David Kauders, let’s start with you. You’ve been saying 
for years that shares aren’t necessarily right for most 
people.  Why not?

Kauders:	Because we live in a society in which politicians have 
encouraged the growth of credit and that credit has given 
us easy answers in getting out of recessions and it’s also 
helped boost asset values and that is share prices.  Now 
unfortunately, it’s a game that’s come to an end, and if 
you look at the east at Japan, the game to an end about 
ten years earlier there.  So we have a model which we 
can apply to say what is likely to happen is lower share 
prices and lower interest rates, not perfectly together, but 
if you stand back from the day by day, week by week 
stories and look at the overall picture over a period of 
ten or fifteen years, those are the long-term trends. 
We’ve had them now for nearly three years, I think 
they’ve got a  long way to go.

Curwen:	So what would you advise people to invest in instead?


Kauders:	Well the first thing to do is to actually pay down any 
debt, any mortgages, credit card accounts and such like.  
Then build up cash reserves and then go into 
government securities gilts, fixed interest so you can 
project today’s yields into a future which is going to be 
ever lower interest rates.

Curwen:	Brian Tora, why not tell people to invest in bonds and 
gilts where the rate of return is fixed, why take a risk on 
shares when the returns are so poor, and as we heard 
from stock market historian, David Schwartz, the 
markets may be depressed for some years?

Tora:	I wouldn’t say that government bonds are without risk. 
The sort of situation that David is suggesting, it relies 
upon inflation not actually coming back to haunt us.  
We’ve had high inflation in the past and believe me in 
periods of high inflation, investment in bonds has been a 
very very poor way of putting your money to work. So I 
think that the real answer is diversification. In theory 
over the long run, you should get a better return from 
shares than you will get from either bonds or indeed 
from cash. That’s over the long run. The reality is that 
share markets over react in both directions.  They go up 
too far, they come down too far as well.  So you’ve got 
to accept that it’s very much a long-term place to put 
your money in.

Curwen:	So are you saying then that it’s a good time to buy 
shares?

Tora:	I’d rather buy shares near to 4,000 on the FTSE 100 
index than I would have done at near to 7,000. So 
you’ve got to accept that when you buy you should be 
buying when most people are selling and that’s the 
strange thing about the stock market. The original 
Nathan Meyer Rothschild said, “you should sell when 
the violins are playing and buy when the canons are 
thundering” and the reality is it means you’ve got to go 
against what the majority of people are doing.

Curwen:	So David, it’s a good time to buy?      

Kauders:	No, it’s not. First of all the history of the stock market is 
that when a great bear market comes round investors do 
lose interest totally in what it’s all about as we’re seeing 
now. 

Curwen:	And by bear market you mean where we’ve got prices 
falling.

Kauders:	Where share prices fall, and the cycle has to go right 
through until the market is hated and there’s no-one left 
in it who’s got disposable money that they could sell. 
We’re not at that point yet by any means.

Curwen:	But how do we know that?


Kauders:	Well we look for falls in share prices of 75 to 90% 
because that’s what’s happened in past cycles. We look 
for low single figure price earnings ratios, we’re not 
there yet, and double figure dividend yields, we’re not 
there yet either. Those are the conditions in which you’ll 
see a major turning point and I would say that’s 
something like ten years away.

Curwen:	Christine Farnish, all these surely are reasons why 
pension funds shouldn’t take risks, why are pension 
funds investing in shares? Last year Boots pension fund 
put all its money into bonds which give a fixed rate of 
return. Isn’t that safer? 

Farnish:	Well I think I’m on the same side of this debate as Brian, 
after all if anyone needs to take a long-term perspective 
on investment pension funds do and pension funds 
because of their size and their ability to look long-term 
into the future and their responsibility to invest long-
term in the overall interest of their members have the 
opportunity to look at all the different sorts of places 
where money can be invested and to have a balanced 
portfolio that spreads risk and diversifies that risk across 
and looks to where long-term rewards can be made.  
And from what I’ve seen and from what just about all 
the professional investment managers I talk to say, 
stocks and shares are a very good place to be for quite a 
sizeable chunk of that portfolio in the long-term.  

Curwen:	But if we’re looking at maybe ten years ahead, we’ve 
heard that there could be falling prices that far ahead.  
Isn’t this really a gamble with people’s retirement 
money? 

Farnish:	Well very few pension funds would be looking ten years 
ahead, unless you just happen to be managing a fund 
where just about all of the workforce were about to 
come up to retirement and it’s got a pretty skewed age 
profile. Most pension funds are looking far far further 
ahead than just ten years.

Curwen:	Mick McAteer from the Consumers Association.  We’ve 
heard what our Inside Money listeners had to say about 
feeling let down.  Are they right, have they been let 
down by shares?

McAteer: 	Well I think the really interesting thing that’s come out 
of the past two years of turmoil is just how much the 
average person in the UK’s financial welfare depends on 
stocks and shares.  I’m not sure that people fully realise 
that their basic livelihood was tied up in their pension 
fund, which is invested in stocks and shares, their 
mortgage endowment policy, which is linked to the 
performance of the stock market and various other 
things.  And the interesting thing is you know if the 
government gets its way you know stocks and shares are 
going to become even more important in people’s lives 
and listening to the debate amongst the professionals 
here, even they’re not clear where their futures going. So 
it’s difficult to understand how the average member of 
society can understand the implications and the risk and 
consequences of using the stock market to provide for 
their welfare.  The government want us to use the stock 
market even more and more, but I think that is quite a 
risk at the moment, unless there are structures and 
institutions in place that allows that transfer of risk and 
responsibility to happen safely. I’m afraid those 
structures aren’t there yet because the average person 
does not have access to the right kind of advice at the 
right time to help them make decisions that will affect 
their future.

Curwen:	David Kauders, do you think there’s a problem that 
we’ve got a generation of private investors who have 
never really lost their shirts on the stock market from Sid 
who bought his British Gas shares through to people 
who got windfall shares from the Building Societies 
which became banks, those of us who bought into PEPs 
and ISAs in the ’90s.

Kauders:	You’re quite right.  People only have one side of the 
story in their recent experience and that is that prices 
always went up and therefore they couldn’t lose, they 
could ignore the warnings and they could borrow money 
and gamble it in the stock market. That’s essentially 
what’s happened with say endowment mortgages, as an 
example, and the reality is that prices do go down as 
well as they go up and there is a reversion to the mean 
effect and downward prices are a fact of life, and people 
did not understand that and have over-exposed 
themselves to a situation they shouldn’t be in.

Curwen:	Christine Farnish, isn’t there also a generation of people 
who run our pension funds and other share investments 
who’ve never really seen the hard times, never seen 
prices keep falling year after year.  Has that influenced 
the way they invested our money?

Farnish:	I’m not sure that that’s an accurate reflection of the way 
in which the professional fund management industry 
works.  I think most professionals working there have 
been around for some time and will have broader 
experience perhaps than you suggest. But let me come 
back to the endowments point, because I think it’s 
important this one, the fact that consumers didn’t 
understand what they were buying and they didn’t 
understand that particular product, that some of it was 
invested in the stock markets and I think that may be 
true of quite a number of products that lots of people 
have got back home and they look at these documents 
and they say, oh I’ve got a with-profits policy here, they 
don’t realise just what that thing is, and I think there is a 
huge need for there to be more transparency and clarity 
about what it is people are buying.

Curwen:	So are you saying that you think some people don’t 
realise their pensions are invested in stocks and shares?  

Farnish:	I think that’s true as well and I think ...

Curwen:	Isn’t that shocking?

Farnish:	It is, it is not a good state of affairs at all, and I think it’s 
beholden on everybody involved in this to try and spell 
out far more clearly exactly what it is that people have 
got, whether it’s an occupational pension scheme or a 
private pension.

Curwen:	Brian Tora, do people understand what they’re investing 
in?

Tora:	A lot of people don’t, that’s certainly true, and perhaps 
more important a lot of people don’t realise that the 
dynamics of the market have changed a great deal. I 
remember the bear market of 73-4. Now that was worse 
than this bear market, it didn’t go on for quite so long 
but it was certainly of a scale that was considerably 
greater than we’ve experienced recently, and I hope we 
don’t suffer the extent of the loss of value that took 
place then. Back in 73-4 you didn’t have a lot of direct 
private investors. There were maybe a few hundred 
thousand of them. Today you have many millions of 
them, so that’s something that’s different.  Back in the 
early ’70s you didn’t have the understanding of the 
demographic changes that are taking place at present. 
Now we know, and I have to say that insurance 
companies and pension funds have been slightly slow in 
factoring this in to their calculations, now we know 
people are living longer, and that means you’ve got to 
provide money for a longer period. 

McAteer:	Again I think it all comes back to this question of risk 
doesn’t it? Brian’s mentioned the ageing population and 
the government explicitly, this isn’t even a subtle policy, 
it’s a very explicit policy on the part of the government 
to transfer the risk of providing for the future away from 
the state on to the shoulders of the individuals. But at the 
same time that is coinciding with the big employer 
schemes who also don’t want to take on the risk of 
providing pensions for the future and they’re closing 
down their final salary schemes to new entrants. They’re 
opening up new stakeholder pensions for their 
employees and when you do open one of these 
stakeholder pensions, all the risk lies with you, you bear 
the risk and responsibility of making sure there’s enough 
money in your pot and you also bear the risk of making 
up a shortfall if things go wrong in the future.  So there’s 
a huge transfer of risk and responsibility on to the 
shoulders of the individual, and you really have to 
question whether or not the individual consumer really is 
ready for that transfer of risk and they certainly do not 
have access to the necessary advice that will help them 
manage their finances for the long-term.

Curwen:	Christine Farnish is that fair?

Farnish:	I think it is largely fair, yes and I think there is a trend 
going on in the marketplace whereby risk is being 
transferred on to individual consumers’ shoulders and 
maybe too much risk is going that way, which 
individuals find very very difficult to manage. Why 
should individuals be expert at being able to sort out 
these very complex matters themselves.  One of the great 
benefits of occupational pension schemes up until now, 
has been that the employer has shouldered quite a large 
part of that responsibility themselves and sort of created 
a benign environment, if you like, for people to save for 
retirement, and I would like to find new ways of making 
it possible for employers to continue to play a very big 
part in this area without unreasonable burdens being on 
their shoulders in terms of the cost and the risk that 
they’re shouldering.

Curwen:	But David Kauders, how do we quantify risk in a 
sensible way that people can understand?

Kauders:	There are no easy measures and I think there’s great 
danger of pumping out too much consumer information 
that produces lots of statistics that just baffle people. The 
reality is to assume risk successfully as an investor, 
you’ve got to approach it in the same way as a business 
does and that is you plan to stay around, therefore you 
don’t take silly risks, you look at everything carefully 
and you make sure you only do what you understand, 
and you basically have to make an assessment of the 
future and make your view of the future, the one you 
stay with.

Curwen:	Christine Farnish, given we’ve all been told by the 
government that we do need to save more and that we 
can’t rely on the state so much, how do we get better 
informed about financial products? As a former 
regulator at the Financial Services Authority who have a 
duty to look at this, how do you make that happen?

Farnish:	Well, the Financial Services Authority, the regulator, as 
you say, has got a responsibility now to try and promote 
public awareness, but I think there is always going to be 
a limit to what can be achieved indirectly by the 
regulator.  It doesn’t matter how much money is put into 
that task. The regulator doesn’t have a normal 
communication directly with consumers when they’re 
buying products.  So I think the industry here has got an 
enormous role to play in terms of making products more 
understandable and trying to be perhaps a bit clearer 
about what a product does and what it doesn’t do.  But 
there’s also a job here for government because it is 
absolutely true that a lot of the regulations that have 
built up over the years, particularly on a tax side, lead to 
a lot of complexity in the market place which we could 
all probably do without. So I think a concerted effort to 
simplify along the lines recommended by Ron Sandler in 
his recent report would really be a big step in the right 
direction.

Curwen:	Mick McAteer, is enough being done by the 
government, by our guardians to educate us about 
investments.

McAteer:	I certainly don’t think it is.  Our view on the regulator is, 
I think its education strategies and so on are rather 
passive, they tend to restrict themselves to producing 
leaflets and websites and whatever. If you are going to 
have a successful financial education strategy in the UK 
it has to be that you are a lot more proactive.  And the 
best way to educate people is to give them access to your 
advice through a person face-to-face.  The research that 
we’ve done in the past tells us that people don’t really 
pay attention to the information provided on fact sheets 
and whatever. The most important thing is the verbal 
communication between a trained, informed 
intermediary who can help guide them through the 
whole financial maze really. That’s really the only way 
you can deliver financial education in the UK.

Curwen:	Brian Tora, how important is this?

Tora:	I think it’s very important.  There is a modest initiative 
in fact in the industry called the Personal Finance 
Education Group, which is a charity, which seeks really 
to take the business of financial education into schools. 
That’s the main way of doing it.

Curwen:	That’s for the next generation, that’s not for people who 
are out there buying products now. 

Tora:	That’s very true it is for the next generation. We have to 
start there and maybe try to back fill with people who are 
investors already. You mustn’t underestimate either the 
sort of, the greed element that exists amongst the public. 
Earlier in this programme I heard somebody point out 
that they had made a 50% gain in a very short period of 
time by buying a technology fund and it’s worth 
mentioning that in February 2000 which is just before 
the peak of the technology market, more than half the 
unit trusts that were bought in this country were 
technology funds. Now I find that a staggering statistic 
and it goes to show how lemming like the public poured 
money into something because they thought it was the 
road to riches.

McAteer:	That’s a bit rich isn’t it?  I mean for goodness sake, the 
vast majority of financial products are sold via these 
very intermediaries you know.  I mean don’t forget, I 
mean the root cause for the mortgage endowment crisis 
was because people were more or less promised that the 
endowments would repay the mortgage using the stock 
market.  Not only would they repay the mortgage, they’d 
give them a fantastic lump sum. The reason the 
technology funds were so popular is because these 
advisers who didn’t understand how past performance 
worked were recommending these technology funds. So 
you know you have to accept that a lot of people’s 
current disillusionment is actually based on their 
expectations that have been garnered by the myths and 
the lies that were put around by the intermediaries at the 
time.

Tora:	I wouldn’t exclude the product providers there. I do 
agree with you, there was a lot of opportunism at around 
that time and as a consequence people promoted 
technology funds because they knew it was an easy sale. 
But for it to be an easy sale you’ve got to have a willing 
buyer at the end.

McAteer:	These things are just much too important you know to 
treat them like commodities.  We’re not talking here 
about sort of High Street goods or buying a pair of shoes 
or what have you. The risks and consequences of making 
the wrong decision, especially when you’re providing for 
your pension is just much too important to be left to the 
market. And I think that’s why it will take a real 
concerted government effort, it’ll take an effort by 
industry and indeed consumers. I think everyone will 
have to really sort of thrash it out you know a concerted 
policy, to make sure we can all provide for the future.  
But as I say, this is not like High Street goods, you 
know, if we get this public policy wrong, I mean current 
generations as well as us, we’ll be paying for the 
mistakes in the future.

Curwen:	David Kauders can I ask you, what would it take for you 
to advise somebody to buy shares?

Kauders:	I’d be looking for share prices to fall to at least half, if 
not three-quarters of where they are today, because I 
don’t think I see anything which tells me the bear market 
is over yet. I’ve looked to see the stock market totally 
and utterly hated, almost reviled. I’ve looked, as I say, 
early in the programme to see dividend yields in double 
figures and price range ratios in low single figures and 
we’re nowhere near those conditions yet.

Curwen:	Is that going to happen?

Tora:	I don’t think it will go quite that far but I do accept that 
we may not have seen the worst of the market so far and 
there are things that have changed which I think 
investors should be aware of.  Just to use a little bit of 
industry jargon which I’ll explain. The incidence of 
stock specific risk has increased massively. By that I 
mean that the risk of a single share going bust is much 
greater than used to be the case.  You only have to look 
at Marconi to know that a well known household name, 
a company valued at billions, can suddenly virtually 
vanish. Enron, for example, was once the sixth largest 
company in the world. So anybody investing must accept 
that there is a lot of risk holding an individual share, and 
there’s a lot of risk attached to events as well, as we saw 
with September the 11th.

Curwen:	Christine Farnish, if indeed the stock market has a lot 
farther to fall, that’s going to be extremely bad news for 
your members for the pension funds?          

Farnish:	If indeed it has.  No-one knows the answer to that 
question, but our pension fund members are in it for the 
long haul and what goes down usually goes up again just 
as what goes up may come down. So I suspect our 
members will be looking rather further ahead than 
perhaps some other people are.

Curwen:	I’m afraid we’ve got to leave it there. One thing 
everybody agrees about here is the need for the savings 
industry to be more open and honest about risks and that 
many of us need to be better informed about investing.  

Curwen:	Thanks to David Kauders, Brian Tora, Christine Farnish 
and Mick McAteer. That’s it from this series. If you’ve 
missed any of the programmes you can listen to them 
again or read transcripts on our website. The address is 
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 and you can then find Inside 
Money in the programme index.  And just before we go, 
many of you have asked us about the fate of Dave and 
Joan McNevin, the couple who were on the brink of 
selling their home to clear their debt to First National 
Bank. The good news is the debts down to less than 
£200 and at the eleventh hour they managed to stop the 
house sale going through. Until next year, goodbye from 
Inside Money.
















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