By By The Newsroom
Copyright scotsman
We’ve spent some of the summer digging into the small print of the Financial Conduct Authority’s Advice Guidance Boundary Review. In one of the research papers there’s a gem of a chart. It shows the “savings and investments products held by consumers” from a survey of more than 5000 UK citizens. And 34 per cent say they are storing cash at home. There are lots of genuine investment questions raised – big important topics which will affect all of us …we thought we’d focus on a completely different question. If one third of people are storing cash at home, what might that mean for mattress height? If you were to have £1 million in cash, and a double bed, there are princess-and-the-pea style implications for keeping money under the mattress (the old classic). The new £50 notes (with King Charles on) are just 0.12mm thick. But you need 20,000 of them to make a million – and a double bed only fits 221 notes in a layer. So the 90 layers you’d need and up raising the bed height by 1cm. Of course, £50 notes are quite rare. Might be easier to use other denominations, but your bed’s getting nearer and nearer the ceiling. Use £1 coins, and you’re half a metre up (and probably quite uncomfortable and noisy!). How realistic a problem is this? Maybe £1 million isn’t reality – but people hoarding cash under the mattress certainly is. Is it any wonder, when the top three sources of finance information are Martin Lewis (cashback, household bills, car finance mis-selling), the bank (fancy a current account?) and friends (no comment)? Advice has never been more important.
