This is sadly my last week as the FT’s personal finance editor before I head off to pastures new. So I thought this was an opportune moment to look back at my tenure over the past two and a half years. Here are a few of my hot tips as well as a review of one or two of my triumphs and tribulations.

But first, what are the biggest lessons I have learnt in personal finance?

The biggest is also probably one of the most obvious. It is the power of compound annual returns. I’m still convinced that it is poorly understood by most people and
that if the secrets of compounding were more widely known then
more people would shun borrowing and invest for the long term instead.

Let’s take two examples. How much do you think $10,000 invested 30 years ago in Berkshire Hathaway – one of the biggest and best performing investment funds in the world – is worth today? The answer, had you invested in October 1976, is $16,716,420. Even £10,000 invested in the UK stock market over the last 25 years has grown to £300,755 today.

The power of compound returns should be etched into the brains of every citizen in the UK. Maybe then more people would put money into pensions.

Someone who invests £5,000 a year for 10 years from age 20 to 30 and then stops making any further contributions will accumulate a fund worth in real terms almost £250,000 by age 65, assuming real annual returns of 4 per cent. If they delay by 10 years and make the same contributions from ages 30 to 40 their fund will be worth less than £170,000.

My next tip is a far less obvious area of personal finance and one that, for whatever reason, has not been widely taken up by the public: the family offset mortgage. I’m not a big fan of conventional offset mortgages, mainly because the interest rates on these tend to be slightly higher than mainstream mortgages and many conventional mortgages are now almost as flexible as offset mortgages.

But I am a fan of family offsets. For certain people these mortgages can make a lot of sense. Take the example of a 35-year-old with a £100,000 mortgage and, for the sake of argument, a benevolent uncle with a heap of cash sitting in various savings accounts. The 35-year-old will be paying interest on their mortgage and the uncle will probably be paying basic or higher rate tax on their savings.

But with a family offset mortgage such as the ones offered by Newcastle and Yorkshire building societies, the uncle could effectively glean tax-free interest on his savings provided he gives this interest to his nephew. If he puts £95,000 into a savings account linked to his nephew’s mortgage, the nephew would only end up paying interest on the £5,000 outstanding balance. For those who want to help out relatives financially but want to maintain full control over their cash, this is a tax efficient and often overlooked solution.

But what of my own triumphs and tribulations? Well I have chosen one of each and they are both linked to interest rates.

My triumph first. Last April in this column I touted a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage from Northern Rock at 4.99 per cent that I thought could make sense for people without a mortgage. The deal allowed you to take out a 15-year borrowing facility at this rate with a commitment to only maintain a mortgage of £1.

Since then, base rates have been hiked five times. Basic rate taxpayers can already get returns of more than 5.2 per cent after tax on the best one-year fixed-rate savings accounts.

So someone who took out a £250,000 mortgage facility could be making £50 a month out of thin air. With one or two more quarter-point hikes on the cards by the end of the year, canny arbitrageurs could soon be getting double that.

Unfortunately, my tribulation relates to my own mortgage. A couple of months earlier I opted for a discounted variable-rate deal when I could have got just as good a fixed-rate deal.

The lesson? I guess, as with all things, anyone can have a good idea. But it’s what you do that really counts.

Anyway, may I extend my best wishes to all FT Money readers, particularly those I have corresponded with.

I wish all FT Money readers further prosperous reading.

rob.budden@ft.com