A mortgage you don’t have to pay off, and can leave to your heirs, sounds almost too good to be true. In fact it’s a variation on the interest-only mortgage which has been around for a long time.

The real point of this shakeup in the industry is that in passing the debt onto your children you slash the amount of inheritance tax they might have to pay.

In recent years house prices have risen so fast that the threshold of death duties — £285,000 ($536,000) per estate — is being exceeded by many ordinary middleclass homeowners. The Chancellor seems in no hurry to fix the problem and so the mortgage industry is attempting to fix it for him.

This type of mortgage is very popular in countries like Switzerland and Japan, where the populations are known for their thrift.

The Kent Reliance Building Society is launching its version this week under the name, Inter-Generational Mortgages. Chief Executive Mike Lazenby said they’d thought of calling it the Deathbed Mortgage but thought “it would be a bit morbid.”

This is a good idea if an elderly parent wants to leave a big-ticket house to the children without death duties. Although in theory the mortgage could be passed down indefinitely, it’s unlikely to happen because the family would pay a lot of interest without ever owning the property.

How best to invest your cash in the UK is always a tricky problem, especially if you don’t have specialist knowledge.

Here are a few pointers that may help :

* Check out the internet-only accounts, which often pay the highest rates.
* You can put £3000 ($5640) in a cash Isa account every tax year. Interest, which is currently over 5pc, is tax-free.
* Some accounts offer guarantees — e.g. Investec’s Hi 5.
* National Saving’s index-linked certificates are definitely worth considering if you pay higher-rate tax.
* Spread money over several accounts. If you opt for a one-year account for some of your savings, you could earn 5.5pc or even more.
* You should be able to earn at least 5pc at today’s rates. Don’t settle for less. Monthly-paying accounts pay around 4.75pc.
* Less fashionable banks sometimes pay more. You can check if an institution is registered here: fsa.gov.uk/consumer.

Finally, be aware of rate changes and read the financial press.

Commercial blogging is not necessarily the same as business blogging. The latter means working for a corporation and blogging its products and services.

Commercial blogging is what this blog is doing. The Money Blog is part of a Web Network Magazine, called Syntagma. It lives, like its print counterparts, by selling advertising around useful content.

There are many types of commercial blogging. If you work alone, you are a “problogger” by one definition. If you work as part of a group, a commercial blogger.

Basically, we are what H.G. Wells called, Originative Intellectual Workers. In one sense, we securitize our talents and put them on a global market to sell to the highest bidder.

Originative Intellectual Workers (OIWs) face many challenges and opportunities in the new world of independent publishing. The opportunities come mainly from relatively cheap, universally-available means of publishing content. A short-list would include, print-on-demand books, ebooks, P2P file distribution, blogs, RSS, content management systems, Wi-Fi, and podcasting.

The challenges arise from the commoditization of information and the inevitability of supply overeaching demand. As Bill French put it: “… information nears the point of zero-price (not zero-cost).” In other words, how does one get paid? Many OIWs simply give away their content and rely on name-brand consultancy and speaking engagements to drive cash flow. Many writers are uncomfortable with that. Showbiz and the pen are not natural bedfellows.

Blogs have come into their own quite quickly. Although business blogging is still in its infancy (less than 1pc are business blogs), all the top OIWs are blogging. But why have blogs taken off in the world of business? Because, says Joyce Wycoff, they are

“Creating an environment where ’serendipitous types of conversations’ occur, a place where people from various disciplines bump into each other and start talking about possibilities.”

So we’re talking innovation here. In an uncertain world situation where educated Indians and Chinese are taking intellectual and software jobs from the West, OIWs are right to be on their guard. They are also right to think innovatively. The East may be good at playing catch-up but, as Tom Peters clearly believes, through innovation we can ensure that they’re always chasing the game.

Blogs play an enormous role in this process. By capturing new ideas and keeping them alive. And by chasing new uses for ideas and testing them in a fluid, receptive environment, they cut the mustard in unpredictable ways.

Blogs can build and drive an innovation factory with the slenderest of tools. Robin Good’s “RSS NewsMaster’s Toolkit” follows up his recognition of NewsMastering as the latest job chrysalis for emerging OIWs.

In Robin Good’s terms, RSS channels — even those originating from simple blogs — are “News Radars” for a new breed of independent publisher and content provider. A News Radar is “a constantly updated thematic channel of highly relevant web references that are gathered in accordance with specific, persistent search criteria.” In simpler terms they are a new means of publishing our work, which may be on “topics, people, opinions, products, news items, events or passions.”

Whichever role you wish to play online, you have to do it very well, because competition is fierce and growing and is not restricted now to the English-speaking world. The whole world is now the English-speaking world.

The most obvious way to make money online is through writing, i.e., becoming a “content provider”.

You might, for instance, sell your work directly to one of the many blog networks now out there. Or you might become a problogger, like Darren Rowse, which means tailoring your writing to specific niches so that well-heeled search traffic will find you and click on your contextual advertising, like Google’s Adsense. By adding to your “page views”, they will also make it easier to sell paid advertising off the site.

We’ll be looking at problogging later in this series. For now, I want to concentrate on direct publishing, selling your words themselves in a print format. Here’s an example that popped into my inbox this very morning:

Marti Lawrence runs a blog called Enter The Laughter, which rather speaks for itself. However, to monetize it further she has decided to put her blog posts into book form using one of the “free” publication tools now available on the internet.

Using Lulu.com Marti has stitched her posts together as: Queen Klutz – The Misadventures of a Very Clumsy Woman:

It takes a bit of work to do this, and it’s not as free as you’d think — an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) costs $99, for example. But Marti has done it, cheerfully confessing her lack of technical know-how in this field.

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