Personal finance: A new look and plenty of new ideas

Welcome to our new-look Your Money section. After the excitement of The Independent's own relaunch earlier this week, a few more surprises. The most important is that this will henceforth be a stand-alone section covering personal finance, property and motoring.

Why these? Because it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the three subjects. If you buy a house, the chances are you may want to pay it off with a PEP or an endowment. Choosing a car means bank loans and motor insurance.

The new section aims to discuss all these subjects intelligently, to give you choices that help you to make informed decisions on these issues.

This week, we return after a summer break with the hugely popular Money Makeover series. In it, there are always a few ideas that you can take away to discuss with your adviser. We are also adding more columnists. For example, our expert Robin Amlot will be guiding novice "netties" through the World Wide Web's financial pages.

This summer's wave of building society flotations has created a vast new army of small shareholders. We aim to cater for it with a series, starting shortly, which will explain the A to Z of stock market investment.

Motoring is also being revamped and will become more prominent, and our property section will be given new air to breathe in.

Most importantly, as the title of this section indicates, this is Your Money. I am happy to receive letters and suggestions from you. The last time I made this rash promise I was inundated with letters. Sadly, my two-finger typing speed and pressures of work mean I cannot promise to reply to every letter. But they are all read and appreciated.

Not all money matters are discussed in this section. Some, like today's story about unit-linked insurance company products, are in the business pages of The Independent because they are news stories.

What is instructive about this story is not just which companies deliver the best and worst products. Equally important is who does not feature in the list.

Last year, I asked why these firms were refusing to provide information to Money Marketing, the specialist magazine which compiled the report.

The reasons they generally gave were lack of time and resources, or that they no longer sell the products. As I pointed out then, there was a surprising coincidence between companies that are poor performers and those that cited lack of time as their reason for not taking part in the survey.

This year - surprise, surprise - the rogue's list is almost identical. It still includes Cornhill, who so generously invited me to an insurance industry bash only two days after my critical comments about them. Pearl, which stopped selling unit-linked plans two years ago, refused to take part.

Also on the list of "refuseniks" is Barclays Life, one of whose people swore, hand on heart, that the bank genuinely didn't have enough resources to complete the questionnaire they were sent by Money Marketing.

I am going to the same dinner, given by the Association of British Insurers, next week. I wonder what Barclays Life will tell me this time?