Everyone’s idea of what income is needed to provide you with an ‘acceptable standard of living’ in retirement is different. In addition, no estimate remains the same for long as prices and the cost of living change year-on-year. However here, drawing upon published material from Standard Life and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), we look […]
The 5th April might seem a little way off yet, but the end of the tax year always seems to arrive faster than we think! For financial planning, the end of the tax year is important for a variety of reasons and so, before we hit the deadline, put some thought into the following five […]
Originally announced during The Chancellor’s Budget speech in March 2014, the new so-called ‘pensioner bonds’ have now been launched. The rates for the bonds, announced only recently, will see them leading the bond marketplace, with the one-year bond offering 2.80% gross/AER and the three-year bond promising 4.00% gross/AER. The bond’s informal title comes from the […]
Did 2014 turn out to be a better than expected year for savers? According to a recent bulletin by Standard Life, the Autumn Statement by the Chancellor in early December rounded-off quite a year, with good news for ISAs and pensions. ISAs and pensions had already had a radical makeover in the April 2014 Budget, […]
Traditionally, December is a ‘slow news’ month. Like August, the great and the good spend a large part of the month on holiday and world events supposedly move slowly, if at all. Not so in 2014 – There was the Autumn Statement in the UK, the tumbling world oil price, the gloom over the Eurozone, […]
November saw the G20 group of world leaders meeting in Canberra. The summit was notable for the new sport invented by the great and good: a bizarre game of musical chairs in order to avoid being photographed sitting next to Vladimir Putin! Not to be outdone in the social pariah stakes, David Cameron turned Cassandra, […]
It is now six years since emergency measures were put in place to protect the global financial markets from imploding when the banking crisis spiked in 2008. To stave off a liquidity disaster, many global policy makers decided to cut interest rates to record low levels. At that juncture most experts, commentators and the investment […]
The price of crude oil has fallen around 40 per cent since a recent peak in June this year. This has a profound effect on economies and markets around the world as the cost of manufacturing and transporting goods falls along with oil producers’ income and the currencies of oil-rich countries. The theory goes that […]
It seems odd that in a general climate where there is so much controversy over foreign corporations paying no tax in the UK, pop stars using dubious tax avoidance schemes, and where there is a raging debate about whether “we are all in this together”, there sits in the middle of our tax system, the […]