Building your emergency savings up for a “rainy day” is important. However, how much should you be saving for this fund and what should it be for?
Read moreTax Year-End Allowances – Use It or Lose It
With the end of the 2020-2021 tax year on 5 April 2021, here are a number of ideas to make the most of your tax allowances and available tax reliefs.
Read moreSocially Responsible Investment
The world of investment is changing, especially where it is no longer possible to ignore statements from our own UK Government making it clear that change is happening.
The Climate Change Act 2008 committed the UK to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions relative to the levels in 1990, to be achieved by 2050. In June 2019, secondary legislation was passed that extended that target to “at least 100%”.
Read moreWhy have an annual review?
November 2020 and the world is still in the midst of the Global pandemic that is Covid-19.
Lockdown, and the easing of restrictions, has led us to living life and looking at life differently and more closely.
But how often should we be looking at our financial wellbeing?
Read moreSimplifying Inheritance Tax
Last year my blog subject covered The Office of Tax Simplification’s (OTS) second report on simplifying inheritance tax.
I thought it was, therefore, a good time to reflect on what if anything has changed. The short answer as Paul Daniels would have said is ‘not a lot’. I won’t cover all the findings, but instead focus on a few areas impacting on financial planning.
Read moreMarket Volatility
In simple terms, volatility is the erratic up and down movements often seen on financial charts.
It’s something you may have heard fund managers talk about – they demonstrate that their fund doesn’t have the move up and down as much as the index they are trying to match or the objective return of the fund.
Over the last decade we have generally seen markets move up, there have been some big movements down, but they have recovered quickly. These recoveries are what traders and fund managers call corrections.
Read moreISAs – 21 years on
This April, ISAs celebrate their 21st birthday. So, I thought it would be a good idea to remind you how good an investment vehicle they can be, just before the end of this tax year.
Statistics suggest ISAs have become a huge hit with savers. The value of adult ISAs stand at over £600 billion, shared between around 22 million account holders. They have also proved popular with successive Chancellors as a means of encouraging the saving habit with the annual subscription limit having almost trebled since launch.
Read moreWhat risk are you taking with your money?
With so much uncertainty out there, people are quite rightly thinking about every decision made. Sometimes even holding back on non-essential expenditure in order to keep savings or build on savings just in case.
These decisions are all based on you weighing up the pros of buying that TV vs the risk that you may need the money soon. This simple decision has lots of moving parts to it and is affected by your past decisions and experiences, as well as other considerations. You are assessing risk.
Read moreShould young people be making the most of the Help to Buy ISA?
The Help to Buy ISA is a government backed scheme that provides a 25% bonus on the balance of the account with a maximum bonus of £3,000, provided the money is put towards the purchase of your first home before 1st December 2030 – so long as the house price is lower than £250,000 (£450,000 in London).
Is more change on the horizon for the already complicated inheritance tax rules?
This month, The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) launched their latest report. The topic this time was inheritance tax.
The OTS does not consider policy issues such as should a tax abolished – they instead look at the administrative side of taxation.
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