The new rules are still being discussed, but there are some clear themes emerging already. It’s most likely that Self Certification Mortgages - those where the borrower declares his earnings without having to supply proof, are going to be banned outright.

Lenders will now have to check borrowers incomes, and borrowers will have to provide proof of earnings, before a mortgage can be given. This proof will take the form of the year end P60 end of year pay and tax certificate, or if you’re self employed, you’re going to have to provide at least three years audited accounts.

Still being debated however, are the actual, exact, figures that will decide on the links between income, property values, and mortgages. New rules could limit mortgages to 3 times income, or 3 times joint income, or some other variant.

125% mortgages are also coming to an end. We’re expecting a ban on all mortgages that, for example, exceed 90% of the house value (Loan To Value or LTV), and the figure could be lower than this.

One of the most controversial moves of the new era is that the UK’s Financial Services Authority wants to crack down on interest only mortgages by demanding that all home buyers have plans in place for repaying the capital they’ve borrowed.

It’s going to be really hard for first time buyers to get a leg up on the market, and many established mortgage holders will become prisoners, trapped because their type of mortgage has become banned, meaning they won’t be able to move until they pay the mortgage in full.

Times are changing rapidly. Now is the time to remortgage or buy for the first time before it gets a lot harder to do so.

Incredible. The UK Government’s plans to tackle climate change is going to add £277 to UK annual household fuel bills unless users give their home a so called “Green Makeover”.

Energy & Climate Change Minister, Chris Huhne, admitted that the massive cost of funding the expansion of wind farms across Britain, as well as clean coal power stations, will send both gas and electricity bills spiralling. The average domestic UK gas bill is £620 per year, and the electric bill is an average of £500. Under the forecasted price rises, these prices will rise to an average of £732 for gas and £665 for electricity - and increase of £277 per year.

Consumer groups have warned that the proposed increases will hit the families and older people who cannot afford double glazing, insulation and new boilers (furnaces if you’re American). Audrey Gallagher, head of the energy policy at Consumer Focus, warned that many families would muiss out on green makeovers for their homes, remaining sceptical that this is going to be delivered, particularily for those on a low income.

Mr Huhne reports that, under the Green Makeover, domestic fuel bills will be one percent higher - increasing by just £13 per year - while business fuel bills will rise by an average of 26% as a result of climate change policies. Defending his decision, Mr Huhne also stated that the cost of fossil fuels was also forecast to rise, and that householders “could” be better off if Britain shifted to green energy.

As a final statement, Mr Huhne stated that” The era of cheap, abundant energy is over. We must find smart ways of making energy go further, and value it for the costly resource it is, not take it for granted.”

Drinking fruit and vegetable juice more than 3 times a week can reduce your risk of developing Alzeimers Disease by an incredible 76% according to a US study.

An accumulation of so called “bad proteins” in the brain is thought to be responsible for the memory loss which marks Alzeimers. But Polyphenols, the naturally occuring anti oxidants found in fruit and vegetables can help by combating the dangerous compounds, known as free radicals, in the brain.

The US Study did not specify the types of juices to drink, but it is now well known that red and orange fruit and vegetables are particularily rich in anti oxidants.

But you shouldn’t cheat and use multi vitamins instead of fresh fruit juice - the study found that taking vitamin supplements didn’t have the same effect- only juices made from fresh fruit and vegetables give you the protection.

The UK’s “Which” consumer magazine has released a list of 10 money wasting products you don’t need after their tests found the products don’t live up the claims on the packaging. Stop wasting money now by ditching the following products:

Separate Household Cleaners
Tests proved that although specific cleaners can help with limescale or mould, everyday stains were just as effectively treated with a normal multi-suface product

Tumble Dryer Balls
Tests proved frying time was slighly longer on a full load using these balls, and there was NO improvement creases or softness

Wash (Laundry) Balls
The pellet filled plastic shells are designed to clean through agitation without using detergent, but most barely cleaned better using water alone at 30C

Colour Catcher Sheets
Totally unnecessary if the instructions on the side of your favourite laundry cleaner and proper sorting of laundry before washing are followed.

Peanut Butter Maker
The gadget took 20 minutes to make 40g of peanut butter, it was very noisy, the lid kept coming off and small chunks remained even if the smooth mode is used

Smoothie Makers
Smoothies can be easily made using a typical jug blender which also eliminates having to clean the tap dispenser on smoothie makers

Gas Cooker/Stove Energy Savers
These sit on the hob and claim to burn gas more efficiently, but it took 167 seconds longer to boil a pan of water, or 24pc more energy!

Small Photo Printers
Not required. Normal general prionters do the job just as well and are generally cheaper

Anti Wrinkle Eye Creams
A “Which” test of 12 creams found a £2.98 pot of Simple Moisturiser had the same “limited effect” as the most expensive pot.

Fuel Additives:
NONE of the additives tested made a noticeable improvement to engine power, torgue, exhaust emissions or fuel economy.

It is true that money cannot buy everything but of course, there are advantages when you have enough or much money. You could be able to meet your needs and provide the needs of those people who depend on you. These fast and demanding times, you have to see to it that you are good at handling money.

You must treat the value of every pound or dollar you use or spend. Just like all the rest of your belongings, money has to be treated with care. There are certain things to be done in order to achieve that certain phase of your life when money is an asset instead being a problem.

Live life the way your resources could cater to your needs
Plan your expenditures. Watch your plan.
Prepare a budget showing how much you would spend for a month and even for as short as a week.
Do not throw away those receipts record them and keep them. Receipts will show you your spending habits.
Don’t rely on credit cards. For now, they may speak to you words of assurance but actually they could be very threatening if misused.
Live a less extravagant way of living. See to it that your habits are not causing you to spend a lot.
Be a critical-thinker. Avoid panic buying and think well before buying products.
Keep yourself healthy as you get sick, you will spend a lot on medicines, prescriptions and other medical requirements.
Avoid gambling. The gambler always loses in the long term.

When you follow these essential reminders, you WILL see better results. You will, eventually, live a financially stable life. You have to watch your expenses. Money is indeed an advantageous asset but having it is a really big responsibility as well.

Paypal is used by millions of internet users daily. It is a holding account that transfers your money to another persons account in return for a fee. It is popular because it means your credit or debit card details are never given to a stranger.

But Paypal is open to easy fraud. Often it can be because an item is collected in person, or if you don’t send or return an item by recorded delivery. The fraudster then denies receiving it and persuades Paypal to take the money back out of your account.

But it isn’t just non delivery claims. Other claims from customers that will result in a sudden drop in your Paypal funds include “Goods not as described”, Faulty goods etc. Paypal almost always pays out to the complainant, no matter what the complaint, unless you can PROVE that you have delivered the item in the event of a fraudulent non delivery claim. As dangerous as it is, any other complaint WILL result in your funds being re-transferred to the complainant, irrespective of whether the “faulty” goods are returned by them or not.

Complaining to Paypal is no good; they won’t budge because you haven’t followed the letter of it’s rules.

The best option is simply not to use Paypal if you don’t have to. However, if you want to use ebay, there often is no other choice. If Paypal is used, ensure you send everything by recorded delivery, and ban personal collections outright on all paypal purchases.

If you still have problems with Paypal, go to the Financial Ombudsman Service. Paypal is regulated by the FSA so must treat you fairly.

UK banks are facing a crackdown on their right to pinch money from savings accounts to pay off customers debts.

They are to be banned from simply swiping cash from an account that is in credit without first assessing whether a customer would be left struggling to pay vital bills. Customers are also likely to be given the chance to pay back debts before money is snatched from savings accounts.

In a further move, warning notices must be sent to customers before any money is taken from them.

Under secretive, controversial rules called “set off”, banks and building societies have the right to move money from an account which is in credit to pay off an unpaid debt. This could be a loan with several months of missed paymernts, or an overdraft. There have also been occasions where joint accounts have been raided to pay off a debt owed by one of the account holders.

Britain’s Financial Services Authority wants this to stop. It’s plans are not to scrap the rights to set off, instead banks are to be forced to face tougher checks that customers are not left stranded.

Work from home scams are a sad fact of life. A lot of people blame them on the internet, but the truth is that these scams have certainly been around as long as the post office, and probably longer. They used to be run by mail, out of a post office box, with advertising in newspapers, magazines, bulletin boards or leaflets through your door.

These days, the advertisements often arrive in the form of email. Why? Because it’s cheap. In fact, it’s virtually free. There are no direct mailing costs. The spammer (it’s usually spam) has to pay for a web server to send the email from, but this does not cost very much. Still, the ads themselves are often the same old thing that they always were.

1. The Stuffing Envelopes Scam

Filling and addressing envelopes for direct advertising was something that used to be outsourced to homeworkers decades ago, before the invention of word processing and mass mailout machines. These days, it is virtually all done by mailing companies. They can print addresses to look like handwriting if that is what the advertiser wants, and do thousands of envelopes fast and cheaply.

If you see an advertisement telling you to send $10 to find out how to make money by stuffing envelopes, it will probably be a scam. All you will receive will be a letter telling you to put up ads in your local area to have people send you $10 to find out how to make money by stuffing envelopes, so that you can send them the same letter. That is if anybody even replies.

2. The Pyramid Scheme Scam

Pyramid schemes are based around the idea that you pay a sum of money, say $10, then recruit 10 people who pay you, so you make $90. For example you have probably seen a chain letter or email that tells you to send a certain amount to the person at the top of a list, then add your name to the bottom of the list and send the letter on to everybody that you know. That is a pyramid scheme.

Pyramid schemes are illegal. They are different from multi level marketing programs, where you may again aim to recruit a certain number of customers but they are buying a product. If people are buying a product or service that is worth the money, it’s generally OK. If they are just handing over money for nothing, it’s an illegal scam.

3. The Computer Software Scam

This is an updated version of the old work from home scams where you would be sold expensive equipment that would enable you to do some highly skilled job that you were told was in high demand.

For example, when doctors began having to submit claims electronically in the USA, a demand grew up for people to do that for them. They didn’t want to have to buy the special software themselves and then have their skilled nursing staff waste time entering data.

So companies that made this type of software, began marketing it as something that you could do at home. ‘Just spend $500 on our software, train yourself in 24 hours and start making money entering data for doctors!’ said the ads.

A lot of people fell for it, bought the software and then found they had no clients. The doctors were all giving their business to large, reputable data entry companies. They didn’t want random home workers to have access to their patients’ confidential records. The aspiring home workers were out $500 and a lot of wasted time.

Whenever you see an ad that says ‘Buy this and then make $x by using it’, be suspicious. Is there really a demand for the skills that you will have? If not, it could be one of the many work from home scams.

If you want to work from home for free, the first thing to consider is whether you want to work for somebody else or have your own business.

Having your own business can bring greater rewards in the long term but it can mean hard work at the start and probably some months with little or no income. In fact, many new business owners find that their business actually costs them money, because there is a certain amount that you have to invest.

It is hard to work from home for free if you are trying to set up a business. You will probably find yourself spending money on stationery, stock, training, equipment, computer software and many other expenses.

What is more, something around 90% to 95% of new home businesses fail in the first five years. So you are not even guaranteed a return on your investment of time and money.

Because of this situation, many people who want to work from home for free decide to work for somebody else instead. When you do this, you are not likely to have any expenses other than maybe a few stamps and phone calls. Sure, the business owner is probably profiting from your work and you are simply paid for your time, but you do not have the risk of the business failing.

Plus the business owner has the task of finding customers and marketing his business. This is one of the most important tasks in setting up a small business. Many people hate doing it and most people have no training in it. This is probably the main reason for that high business failure rate, in fact.

But you can cut all this out by working for others. A lot of businesses are run entirely online these days, and business owners will hire you without caring where you live. You have no commute and you are usually free to do the work at times that suit you, although of course there will be deadlines for delivery.

The skills that are needed by online businesses are often associated with the internet, of course. However, you do not necessarily have to know a lot about computers. If you are a good graphic designer you may find work designing websites or simply designing the graphics. If you can do the technical work of coding a site or setting up a blog, you will find many people happy to pay you for doing that.

For example, you could set up a few sample sites and then visit local businesses in your area and show them the sites that you designed. If you can do some SEO work so that the sites rank well in Google, local businesses will often employ you to design or tweak their own site to get them better rankings. Most restaurant owners, builders, etc could benefit from having a well designed website but do not have the time or the wish to work on it themselves.

Of course if you do not have these skills there are other opportunities. Writing articles for website owners can be a steady way to make money. For this you need to be able to write good English. It helps if you can also quickly pick up a subject by reading about it. You will need to be able to research the topic and then write in your own words so that the article is original and does not break any copyrights. Craigslist and elance.com are good places to start if you want to look for writing work from home for free.

The best way to get a work at home job is to search on the internet. That is where most companies do their advertising these days. Of course they still use newspapers and magazines too, but when it comes to looking for people to work from home, they want to target a wide area.

If you know what you want to do, try to find websites that deal with that particular area. Popular ways to work from home include telephone sales, market research and customer support. You can do all of those on the phone although you may also need to use email.

You can also try searching large job recruitment websites. One example of such a site is www.hotjobs.com which is operated by Yahoo. Here you can search for jobs in any field and you do not even need to know what you want to do. You can just look at all the possibilities.

Remember that it does not matter much where the job is based. The point is to find something that you can do from home. So when you search, keep the geographical area as wide as possible. If it limits you to one state, search all the states individually.

Think about the words that employers might use in their job title when they write their ad for a home based worker, and search for those words. Here are some examples: teleworking, home based, telecommuting, homeworker, etc. Use all the variations that you can think of, e.g. home-based as well as home based.

When you find something, take some time to prepare your application. It is true that there are many work at home job opportunities but there are also many people looking for them, so you need to stand out from the crowd when you make your application.

The way to do this is to think about the employer and what problems they have that you could solve better than other people. For example, one of the major difficulties the employer of home workers has, is that the people they hire are often unreliable. They lose interest in the work or have other priorities that come first in their lives (often, their kids). So after a while, the work is often not being done well, or even not being done at all.

This means that the issue of reliability is something that you should always address when you apply for a work at home job. What makes you sure that you are going to be able to do the work? Can you guarantee to give a certain number of hours per day to the job? Have you done anything else before, where you had to put in time every day? Do your kids go to school or day care? If so, say so. This will give you an edge over other applicants when you are applying for a work at home job.