It's a dangerous day to be offering any kind of service to anyone. I could barely restrain my fury today when I was told I'd have to wait five minutes for my morning coffee.

Honestly, as if anyone is so busy they can't wait five minutes for anything.

Normally I would have apologised for asking for it, and for making her rush to brew it, and offered to have a glass of water instead.Today I wanted to write a strongly-worded letter to someone.

And where has this strange consumer rage come from? It's the knowledge that today is World Consumer Rights Day - the day when we should all get what we're entitled to.

However, as my early morning coffee rage demonstrates, there's a fine line between demanding your rights, and being bad-tempered and unreasonable. So in an effort to avoid some sort of worldwide outbreaks of fisticuffs in shops and cafes, we've put together a quick guide to your rights, and how to assert them.

It's official. Our debt problems aren't just terrible, they are unimaginably awful. A debt charity has announced that for one in three of the people who contact them, there's no traditional solution available. There's no clear way out.

This is already bearing in mind that some of the solutions they are talking about are awful, and include everything from signing up to a strict budget for the next five or ten years, to losing your home in bankruptcy.

What they are saying today is that for one in three people, even if they did all of this, they still wouldn't be able to cope with their debts.

However, the charity, the brilliant CCCS, does point out that there may still be a way out.

I love the run-up to an election. It's like the run-up to Christmas, where every day in the little governmental advent calender, there's another lovely treat to keep us sweet. Today's treat is a pretty big deal though, it's a new tranche of rules for credit card companies which should make things both fairer and clearer.

There's no catch either (except for a sight feeling that it is timed very nicently for the election). It is genuinely fantastic news.

So what are the rules and how will they help?

There's a very old adage that everyone is born a Liberal but dies a Tory. So what happens? Is this some sort of natural change as we get older? Do people get increasingly angry about rip offs? Do we get disillusioned with life and start to see things in black and white?

This week, after a particularly passionate post of the topic of Royal Mail - who I can cheerfully say slowly destroyed any faith I may have had in them over the course of the five months of industrial action - I was accused of being a Thatcherite.

I almost choked on my ciabatta.

However, my reaction to news about public sector pensions made me wonder whether there's some truth in the accusation, because I am enraged at the discovery that I am personally paying an annual bill of £516 to bolster incredibly generous pensions for public sector workers.

Weyhay, it's the end of the country's financial woes!

A new service has launched today offering free money advice to everyone. The service, called Moneymadeclear is run by the Financial Services Authority, funded by the money lying unclaimed in bank accounts that people have forgotten about.

The website will provide information on all sorts of things, from how to invest, to how to go about buying a car, getting a credit card or avoiding scams.

Genius. Now we need never wonder about anything money-related ever again.

There's only one tiny flaw in the plan. It's a complete waste of time.

The financial regulator recently came out with a shocking claim. Lord Adair Turner warned that if we had shock rises in interest rates, more rises in unemployment, or falls in property prices, millions of people could lose their home.

He said young families and young professionals were most at risk.

And the scary thing? All three of those things are entirely possible.

So what can we do about it?

Today the geniuses who reside under the golden arches have announced that youngsters who get a McJob at McDonald's can gain their very own GCSE-equivalent McQualifications.

There is, apparently, a range of different qualifications - presumably everything from applying a bucket-load of concealer to your hideous acne to trying to remember a soft drink order in the time it takes you to walk from the till to the machine.

It sounds like the set up to a joke, but it genuinely claims you can get everything from the equivalent of a B-grade pass in one GCSE for completing two week's work experience (a BTEC Level 2 Certificate in Work Skills) to the equivalent of five grade A*-C GCSE's for completing one of 10,000 McApprenticeships.

There remains only one question...... why?

How many people can say their workplace is somewhere they actually enjoy hanging out? And how many people are able to combine their hobbies and their career? It seems like the perfect way to live.

So while you're sitting around in the student bar in the dying days of your university career pondering an uncertain future, the thought of running your own pub starts to seem tempting.

Punch Taverns has decided to cash in on this demand, by launching a graduate scheme. It has made 236 pub properties available to graduates under a scheme called Capital Builder. For £5,000, graduates are given the chance to become a landlord, which is a much lower cost than usual.

So is this a great deal, could pub ownership be the answer?

New figures have revealed that if you ever want to be able to afford to buy your own home, you can ditch any plans to have kids, at least if you live in London. Apparently in the capital nine in ten families with children cannot afford their own home in their 40s.

If you decide against breeding then you have a better chance, because almost a third of couples without kids can afford a house of their own (at least they could in 2008 when the figures were last available).

So just how bad have things become, and what can we do about it?

The housing market has always been a confusing place to look for certainty and absolutes, because your home is worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it - no more, no less.

Working out what someone will pay for your house is a fairly dark art, but there is one major influence, the balance between supply and demand, and figures out today reveal that this has turned.

So what does it mean, and what next for house prices?