Christmas comes early for savers
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has said that people should not be disenchanted with schemes that make it possible to save for Christmas early simply because of the Farepak fiasco.A concern of the OFT is that people have been put off by the collapse of the Farepak Christmas hamper scheme in 2006, but says that as long as consumers are aware of the risks involved, it is not too late to start saving for the festive season.Colin Brown, director of advisory, policy and international at the OFT, told BBC One's Breakfast programme: "What we are doing is starting a campaign across the country with pensioners groups, housewives groups and mother and toddler groups and so on in the communities to tell people what the range of different saving schemes and ways of putting money aside for Christmas really are. "There is credit unions, there is supermarket savings schemes, milkmen run hamper schemes and of course there are special accounts at banks and building societies, so there is quite a wide range of different ways of doing it."Mr Brown added: "People have this range of options available and they need to think about the risks of the different options because after all banks and building societies are rock solid safe because they are covered by the financial services compensation scheme, same goes for credit unions. And there are different protections for the different methods."
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