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ALL TALK, NO COST

Phone users are being ripped off when they make calls to government departments and large companies via 1850, 1890 and 0818 numbers. While mobile users who pay by bill have a block of “free” minutes credited to their phone each month, these minutes include standard land line and mobile numbers, but usually not other numbers.

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WHEN you go north of the border, prices go south. This simple fact now has shoppers from the Republic regularly travelling in droves to towns such as Newry to do their shopping.

Tesco is fighting hard with its new Cash Savers campaign – a throwback to the yellow pack days of the 1980s – but it will find it hard to close the gap on German discounter LidlLast summer, a survey by Ireland’s new National Consumer Agency found only a €2 difference in the cost of 58 popular items bought in supermarkets. The survey was astonishingly blind to a new cultural phenomenon. It did not include German discount retailers Aldi and Lidl, two competing giants that have offered impressively good value to Irish shoppers since opening their first stores here in the 1990s.

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In recent years, the internet has emerged as an expansive source of information for consumers, yet many of the grassroots sites that have sprung up have already disappeared.

It’s perhaps not surprising then that Irish prices are among the highest in Europe, with “Rip-off Ireland” as much a reality as when the term was coined a decade ago. Consumers’ concerns today are not very different from those expressed back in September 1966, when a large crowd gathered in Dublin for the inaugural meeting of the CAI. Speakers bewailed bad value and called for more reliable information on goods.

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Most of us have less money these days and so are worried about spending on our social life.

But if you’re smart, you can enjoy yourself and make your cash stretch an awful lot further, thanks to the many money-saving websites out there.

Here are some that will definitely help keep your bank balance in the black.

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We may all have less disposable cash this Christmas but that doesn’t have to mean we’ll have a miserable one.

As the decade closes we may recall the giddy highs of thinking we could, and should, buy whatever we want — the scramble to buy property at inflated prices and the knowing we were paying over the odds for everything but the feeling there was nothing we could do.

Now we know there is something we can do. Shopping around makes sense. Collectively asking for better prices and a better service can bring results.

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For a few mad years, Irish consumers and their money were easily parted. But now that the boom is over it is finally dawning on us that Rip-Off Ireland was a fact, not a slogan

EVERYONE HAS their favourite tale of Rip-off Ireland. Mine dates back a few years, when I called in to a well-known shop that installs kitchens just as an expensively-dressed woman flounced out. The owner was shaking his head: “I tried to put her off, because I’m run off my feet, but she insisted. I quoted her €37,000 to get rid of her. The kitchen costs €20,000. But she said: ‘when can you start?’”.

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Bookies are sometimes characterised as being sharks who will take your money quickly and skilfully. One way of getting punters’ cash, though, is unquestionably objectionable. It is the two-faced system pertaining to Mastercard accounts on bookies’ websites.

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