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The following is a post by Linden Kramer

Income insurance, also known as income protection or permanent health insurance, has been created in order to ensure those that take out such a cover will in turn receive a regular tax-free monthly benefit as a replacement cover.

This is of course only applicable if those with such a cover were suddenly unable to work due to an injury or illness. An illness or injury can cause work to cease completely; however, this doesn’t mean the household bills, repayments, and school and university fees, car insurance costs and any other direct debits will also cease.

The most you will receive will depend on your annual income and the benefit received will be based on a percentage of this income. The above insurance cover applies to both those that are employed by a company and also those that are self-employed and work on a freelance basis.

Those that take out such a cover and end up losing work due to an injury, for example, will receive a monthly benefit cover up until they are able to return to work, or alternatively until their policy ends.

Policies tend to end around the standard retirement age. There is, however, no limit to the claims made, as long as those who take out such a cover continue to pay their monthly premiums on time and every time. The policy will last until those that have taken it out reach the end of their term.

When looking for an insurance policy such as income protection, make sure you find out what your employer offers first. Otherwise you could end up paying for more than you in fact need to! What your employer covers will certainly influence you on the level of income protection insurance you need. Different work places will offer different incentives, which is why it is always wise to check.

The following post is by Adam Croft.

Recently, there has been something of a boom in investments in gold. This can partly be put down to worldwide economic volatility; in troubled times, gold is seen as a solid investment. Also, its price has recently been on the rise, which has led to an increase in interest in this precious metal.

So, does this mean you should abandon your stocks and shares ISA in favour of gold?

Share ISAs are popular with many people in the UK as they provide a tax-free means of investment that can produce excellent returns in terms of dividends. However, as investments can go down as well as up depending on how the stock market performs, some people are wary of investment ISAs.

It might not be time to jump ship to gold just yet, though. There have been gold bubbles in the past where the price has been very high and then it has dropped rapidly, leaving investors with much less than they started with. Also, gold production has been in decline since 2003, it is a limited resource and mining it is getting more expensive. This helps to account for why the price of gold is consistently high, as do recent currency depreciations around the world.

However, the stock market is more likely to grow in the long term than it is to shrink. Most currencies can also expect to pick up in the long term, which means the price of gold depreciates against them rather than the other way around as has been happening recently. This means that choosing the best stocks and shares ISA might be something of a long term commitment, but it is likely to be worthwhile and has the potential to produce bigger dividends than gold (especially if the gold bubble bursts).

Plus, a shares ISA means you can liquidate your assets and get access to your cash more easily than if you have invested in gold. There is no easy answer to this debate; both ISAs and gold have their merits and neither should be written off – but investment ISAs are more likely to be beneficial to most people than gold.

Did you know that for every hour spent searching for discount codes on the internet an average saving of around £65 ($101) is made in total?

Over the past few years discount codes have shown impressive growth numbers, resulting in an estimated 88.2 million people using or who would use a discount code online in 2011.

Check out the infographic below for a little on the evolution of the coupon code. (Click to enlarge it.)

The Evolution of the Coupon and Discount Codes created by DiscountCoder.com

It’s funny how differently we act when we know that there’s only a limited amount of something. I think much of this is subconscious. I don’t think of myself as a wasteful person, yet I noticed that I’ve gotten much more use out of a container of lotion than I normally would have. Why? Because I know that I can’t get any more of it until mid-October.

You see I have some vanilla-scented lotion that I love that’s only available for a couple of months each year. My husband gets it for me for Christmas, and I use it all year long. But I’m running low on it, and we’ve still got a ways to go before Christmas.

I keep squeezing the container, trying to eek out every last bit in hopes that it will last me a little longer. But if I knew that I could go out and get some more right now, I probably wouldn’t be trying as hard to use it up. Yes, there is a balance to be found between going to extremes, but how much more could we save in the long run if we were just a little bit more careful to get more use from things?