Money

A London parent who gets a pay rise from £99,000 to £130,000 ends the year poorer. The reason is a number Alistair Darling picked in 2009 that nobody has touched since.

Ask people how much of their pension is invested in Britain and they guess about 40%. The real figure is under 5%, and in the default funds at Aviva and PensionBee, a single American chip company outweighs every British company combined.

Somewhere in your house is a blue card with £3.08 on it. Multiply that by 95 million and you get TfL's least talked-about cash pile, and a surprising twin on the Bitcoin ledger.

Britain switched off its prison currency in 2018. Within months, inmates had reinvented money from scratch. What they chose tells you what money really is.

The Freddo was 10p for thirteen years. Cadbury itself now charges 45p, and cocoa only explains about 3p of the journey. A chocolate frog's guide to where your money went.

For thirty-eight years the ONS published what a pint cost, every month, in pence. The series stops in January 2025 at £4.83. Here is what replaced it, and why two official figures for the same pint are 41p apart.