Let HMV be a warning on gift vouchers

Tim Bennett rounds up the week’s personal finance news, including: mortgage payments at their lowest levels for a decade, and the latest boiler-room scam to hit unsuspecting punters.

Mortgage payments have dropped to their most affordable level for a decade as lenders slashed rates, says Rachel Rickard Straus on Thisismoney.co.uk. Thanks in part to the government's Funding for Lending scheme, typical mortgage payments for first-time buyers and home movers "have plummeted to 28% of typical incomes, down from a peak of 48% in 2007". But we're not popping the champagne corks.

According to the Ernst & Young sponsored ITEM forecasting club, general inflation is set to run ahead of wages in 2013 and job insecurity will remain high. Meanwhile, house prices are still too high for many buyers and deposit terms for first-time buyers are still pretty stringent.

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.