ft your money

How the might have fallen! Once upon a time FT Your Money was a grand edifice at the centre of the personal finance universe. Nowadays it resembles an estate that is running into disrepair. The great house is still in excellent nick but the outbuildings have been neglected and the grounds are littered with out-of-date content, pedestrian guides and over-clever (and usually unfinished) tools.

Your Money is easily accessible from the home page, the section is divided by financial topic - inter alia, investment, residential property (Your Home), pensions, tax, insurance (life and general) and banking.

If you have a particular interest in a topic, you can elect to receive breaking news by e-mail alert, e-mail summary or by your chosen RSS feed. Other than breaking news, the most interesting and useful content (in my opinion) is in the following areas:

Your Investments includes a Fund Finder where you can search for the best/worstt performing funds over a period of up to 5 years. Filter your search by fund manager, fund category (UK, offshore), risk, income, ISA-eligibility and minimum investment level; charges; Standard and Poor's, Lipper, Morningstar and Bestinvest ratings; and performance targets.

There is also a tool for comparing UK and offshore managed funds by a range of criteria, including performance (1 calendar year, 1-5 year cumulative, quarter-on-quarter), charges and ratings. Up to five funds can be compared graphically.

Your Home allows you to browse regional house prices (interactive map) with the FT house price index.

Advice & Comment offers weekly features covering Stockpicking Tips, Doghouse (i.e. sharp practices), global market trends and the Serious Money column; Beginners Guides (up to date), Money Surgery (Q&As to experts), the inevitable Money Makeover, Money Maverick (i.e. odd-ball investments) and My Portfolio in which active investors agonise over their net worth.

You can also compare and apply for credit cards, unsecured loans, mortgages; current accounts, savings accounts; home insurance, motor insurance, travel insurance; share dealing (all via Moneysupermarket); life assurance (theidol); home phone, gas, electricity (via u-switch).

The site is let down by some poorly developed tools. The Life Assurance calculator is laughingly perverse. The Mortgage Affordability calculator miscalculates the monthly payment on a capital-and-interest mortgage. The Buy v Rent calculator does not allow you to enter the mortgage rate and does not disclose what rate it is using (it's around 6.8% p.a.). The Inflation Calculator gives the wrong answer for the purchasing power of a lump sum and the ISA Charges calculator is only roughly right.

The site is littered with guides of one description or another. The best are found in Advice & Comment. Another batch under Learn were last updated in 2004. This is particularly annoying given the momentous changes in the pensions and inheritance tax regimes. A third batch is only available by subscription.

Read Your Money for breaking news and informed comment on current issues. If you want to quantify anything, use your own calculator