Selling to rent (STR as it is now known) has made some financial sense for some years now in cash flow terms – i.e. rents have been generally cheaper than mortgage payments on most properties. But now that the chances of making a capital gain on owning a house (the only reason to have bought over the last 3 years) look pretty low, it seems to make more sense than ever.

Have a look at www.primelocation.com. Here you can see the rental and sale prices of hundreds of thousands of houses. It makes for very interesting reading. One example sent in by a reader from Wales makes the point very clearly. He points to a nice looking ‘executive’ four-bedroom house with views over fields to the rear and close proximity to several excellent schools. It is both for sale and for rent. The sale price is £315,000 (at least 12 times the local average wage). A repayment mortgage on this amount would come to around £2,000 a month and even an interest-only mortgage to around £1,500. Yet you can rent this very same house for £750 a month (offering its current owner a pathetic gross yield of under 3%), a saving of £750 a month – and that’s before you even factor in the fact that you don’t have to be responsible for its upkeep.

The situation is much the same in other parts of the country. There has, for example, been much talk about how fast rents are rising in central London, but they’re going to have to rise an awful lot faster for it to make sense to buy instead of renting.

A 3 bedroom mews house in Bayswater currently costs around £1m. The cost of owning it, on even an interest only mortgage, would therefore come in at something like £55,000 a year - and that’s only if you don’t include the purchasing costs, (another £45,000 or so) or the maintenance (at least another £5,000 a year). The cost of renting a similar house? About £39,000 a year. That’s £16,000 less.

Homeownership isn’t everything

I am not suggesting that people with no serious financial problems, with mortgages they can afford and with houses they and their families like living in suddenly sell up and rent instead. Moving house is an awful lot of bother if you don’t have to do it.

But if you are heavily in debt and scared of losing your home (as the newspapers seem to think everyone is), why not just sell up, move into a cheaper rented house and then pay off your debts with the money you save on not having a mortgage every month? My guess is that over the next five years being debt free is going to feel a lot better than being up to your eyeballs in interest payments, even if the latter means you get to keep claiming ownership of your own (depreciating) home.

Where to find the highest interest rates on the market

And if you are one of the many first time buyers desperate to get a foot on the ladder and endlessly whining about it in Mail on Sunday case studies, why no stop worrying, keep renting and save the difference? If interest rates and house prices keep coming down at their current rates odds are you’ll be able to afford one soon enough. And if you are wondering where best to keep the money you save as it accumulates, click here to see the accounts offering the highest interest rates on the market: UK savings accounts – best buys (http://www.moneyweek.com/file/36868/uk-savings-accounts---best-buys.html)

I’m afraid you won’t like this answer but I have double checked for you and it seems that your husband is right: the only way for you to be able to share the pension is to actually get divorced. I hope you find a way to work things out....

If you are reading Moneyweek, are reading our emails and have read Love is not Enough I really can’t see that you need to do anything else. You must be quite an expert by now!

Thank you very much for doing so much reading!

The key - if you are taking a cash Isa is just to get the best possible rate of interest - see www.moneysavingexpert.com to see which they are. It all adds up. Otherwise if you are interested in investing and markets Moneyweek does cover a lot every week (www.moneyweek.com). Even if you don't want to get the mag we do a few free emails you can sign up for that will give you a lot of useful personal finance and investing information. If you are after a cheap pension Hargreaves Lansdown (www.h-l.co.uk) is worth a visit: their Isa and Sipp charges are both low. Good luck

Yes you do! Everyone knows that there is a pensions crisis in the UK today. According to IndpendentAge, the average weekly income received by retired households is actually falling: it was £368 in 2003 and £356 in 2004. And one in three pensioners lives on a mere £150 a week, while the average pensioner is so strapped for cash that they spend less on food and drink in an entire week than the average non-pensioner spends eating out (about £20), according to Virgin Money. Why do you think you see so many elderly people behind the checkout at the supermarket these days? They aren't doing it because it's fun. They're doing it because they're living longer than they ever imagined they would and it's the only way they can pay their bills

Given that all this is common knowledge, you'd think that the rest of us would be tripping over our selves to save, save, save, so they would find themselves in a more comfortable position come old age. But not a bit of it. The number of people making no provision at all for their retirement is actually rising and has been for a decade: two in five people are saving nothing. A recent survey from Accenture showed that while 71% of us think that we need £14,000 or more a year to retire in reasonable comfort over 40% of us are not saving nearly enough to meet those goals. 21% of those surveyed had such dismal saving situations that they actually said they were pinning their hopes on having their savings topped up by lottery or pools wins.

Overall, says the Association of British Insurers, the nation is saving £27 billion less a year than it needs to survive in retirement. Think about having just £20 a week to spend on food and drink. That might be OK for one week but could you manage it every week until you die? Keep ignoring your pension arrangements and you will have to. Love is not Enough takes you through all the pension possiblities and explains in the simplest possible terms how you can make the most of them. It is perfectly possible - if you arrange things properly - to live well now and to live well when you are old.

I don't think you should. I just don't see the point. If the photographer doesn't turn up how will getting a cheque for £200 help you to remember your big day? And if the food gives all your guests food poisoning what are you going to do? Claim on insurance and get them all back to eat it again? Of course not. The fact is that the only thing you could really do with insurance against is the wedding not taking place but that would only happen if you or your groom-to-be changed your mind. And no one will insure you against that. So take the £200 you might have spent on wedding insurance and put it in a special account to earn interest and pay for a weekend away on your first anniversary.

I look at this in detail in the book but the first thing to know is that you must invest it! If you do not the government will do it for you and you won't get the most out of the money for your baby. I've put my own into shares (a fund with Foreign and Colonial) on the basis that over 18 years they are almost certain to offer a better return than a cash account.

A second hand one - no doubt about it. A new car loses 20% of its value as soon as it leaves the forecourt and will be worth 30% less than its list price within three months. A few examples. If you had bought a Citroën Xsara Picasso 1.6 SX in 2004 it would have cost you £14,100. Try to sell it eighteen months later and you'd have got (according to What Car? ) around £6,000 for it. That's a loss of over £8,000 or 57%. You'd have lost a similar amount on a Ford Ka 1.3 hatchback (£5,000 or 52% of your cash) or a Saab 9-3 1.8 four-door (£9,250 or 45%). On the Saab you're losing about £17 a day. On a really expensive luxury car you could be losing £100-plus a day. This doesn't make any sense at all. Why would anyone throw that kind of money around just to drive a brand-new car? Particularly as a new car turns into a second-hand car as soon as you drive it off the forecourt. I've never heard a good answer to this question.

When I see something I want in a shop I look at the price and see how many work hours it will take me to pay for it. Then I decide if it is really worth buying. Take a £200 handbag. If you earn £30,000 a year and work 8 hours a day, you are clearing around £10 an hour after tax. So that handbag is going to cost you 20 hours, or two and a half days of solid work. Do you want it that much? Sometimes the item in question might be so perfect that you do want it that much. Mostly I think you'll find you don't.

Pre-nups I know all about, and given how much later we all get marreid these days I think they do make sense – everyone in Hollywood has one. By the age of 35 or so you will (hopefully) have built up something in the way of assets. You may have some equity in your house, a reasonable sum in an ISA and some pension savings, for example. And if your marriage fails after a year or two you won’t want to share those hard-won assets with your. So you need to think about ring-fencing them.

Prenuptial agreements are not legally binding in the UK but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth having. Why? First because discussing one means that you both have to make full financial disclosure and that as a result should end up with a clear idea of each other’s financial assets and aims. It’s a good way to get the conversation going – to force communication. And second because if you do end up in court they will give a judge an idea of what your pre-marital intentions and that makes a difference: the Sunday Times points to the case of M v M in 2002 which concerend a five year marriage with one child. The wife had agreed to a settlement ot £875,000 in a pre-nup and depsite claiming £1.25m that’s precisely what she got. More disappointed still must have been the wife in the 2003 case of K v K. the husband was worth £25m but the wife had agreed in the pre-nup to getting only £125,000 if they seperated (which they duely did after 15 months). Anyone who thinks the divorce laws in the UK are overweighted towards women should note that the court upheld the contract: she got £125,000.

But what of post-nups? It is not really my business of to ask if you might not have been better doing a bunk at the altar so we’ll leave that aside and just look at the viability of this kind of contract. In the US, says the FT, these have become the “latest accessory for the super rich,” particularly those working at hedge funds. At least one US fund has started refusing to taken on new partners until they sign a post nup barring their spouses from making any claims on the fund and even those firms that don’t actually mandate them often “encourage each other to sign them to protect both the firm and themselves.”

This clearly makes sense for the man (if in an unpleasantly cold blooded way) but it is hard to see quite how it makes sense for the financially weaker partner in a marriage – usually the woman: all it does for them is make it easier for their husband to dump them for a younger model later. So why do they do it? To preserve their marriage one Manhattan divorce lawyer told the FT: “She’s bargaining for the marriage and the husband is bargaining for divorce.”

Good news then for put upon wives: post nups are muchless likely to stand up in court than pre nups. Lisa Fabian Lustigman, a family lawyer at international law firm Withers LLP explains: “The reason for this is simple – a judge will set aside any pre-nuptial agreement if they consider it to have been signed under any form of undue pressure. The same principle applies to mid- and post-nuptial agreements.” Such pressure is easy to imagine in the case a contract signed after a marriage – one party may feel they have to sign the agreement or a separation will follow.” Post nups only tend to come up in conversation when a marriage is already in trouble. This leaves them very “open to challenge,” particularly if a judge considers them to be in any way unreasonable.

So to answer the question on post-nups, if your marriage is in trouble and you’re the main breadwinner and you don’t want to share you’d be wise to push for one just in case it helps you out when the time comes. If you aren’t the main breadwinner you should probably avoid signing one but also remember that if you sign it under duress it isn’t valid anyway. That said, there are some times says lawyer John Nicholson in the Sunday Times when having a post nup does make sense and will probably be upheld. An example? “If, say, the wife’s father said he would buy the couple a £2m house provided she kept the property in the case of divorce, both parties might feel it in their interests to sign a post-nup.”