Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

I got a scare earlier today. It came in the form of a call from the college where I’m doing my post-graduate course. After a minute or so of security questions and hoo-hah, they said that there had been a problem with my payment.

Of course, it follows that I was a little worried. Here I was, in the middle of my course, and something was wrong with payment..

I decided to look up information on loans online, because I have a habit of Googling things when I need quick answers to problems, and more often than not there are other people who have gone through, or are going through, the same sort of situation.

There are a number of IFA’s — or independent financial advisors — on the internet, where you can search and ger reviews on all sorts of sites and solutions. And it’s things like that that can come in handy in a hurry.

Sometimes these can be better than the actual search engines. On Google, results can often be riddled with things you might not want to find. For example, house insurance quotes came in abundance when I searched on there, even when I didn’t specify anything like that as keywords. And private medical insurance, too.

But before I panic too much, I think I should perhaps get in touch with the bank and see exactly what the problem is. It migt just be that they are staggering the course payments, and I didn’t know about it.