People love to speculate about when interest rates will rise, but no one actually knows when they will change here in the UK or anywhere else in the world. One certainty is that when rates do rise, bond prices will fall because the two are connected like the opposite ends of a see-saw. This worries […]
June was a good month for British and Chinese manufacturing, a disastrous month for General Motors (GM) and sadly, the England team who can now be found on the beaches of the Algarve. At least they escaped the anger directed at South Korea’s players, who were pelted with toffees on their return to Seoul! UK […]
Almost two out of three Britons have not made a Will and risk leaving a financial nightmare for family members when they die, warns the Law Society. Research coinciding with ‘Dying Awareness Week’, published in May 2014 from the Dying Matters Coalition, revealed that only 36 per cent of British adults say they have written […]
HMRC has revealed a dramatic jump in its revenues thanks to its recent measures aimed at clamping down on tax avoidance schemes. During the course of the tax year 2013/2014, HMRC claims that it has generated an extra £23.9 billion in tax; a staggering figure, especially considering it puts them £1 billion ahead of a […]
‘Out with the old and in with the new’ regimes The Chancellor’s March 2014 Budget may well go down as one of the most radically overhauling game-changers since Lloyd George ushered in the state pension in the 1908 Pensions Act (at the time perceived as dangerously radical). It has completely levelled the playing field as […]
In a post-Budget survey, MGM Advantage revealed data showing the risk people are willing to take managing their own pension savings when rules over pensions come into force in 2015. 28% of the over 55s surveyed said they were not comfortable taking on the risk of managing their own pensions to provide a suitable income […]
Virtually all the headlines surrounding George Osborne’s recent Budget were about the changes to the pensions rules. Rightly described as the biggest changes to pensions legislation for a hundred years, they will have far-reaching implications for the financial planning of many of our clients. With all the attention devoted to pensions, it was easy to […]
The growth of self-employment has become one of the stories of the UK economic recovery. While the share of total UK employment accounted for by self-employment has risen for decades, bucking the trend internationally, its pace has accelerated since 2008. While the number of employee jobs has only recently regained its pre-recession level, the number […]
The month got off to a gloomy start, especially if you are a Guardian reader. Five signs the global recovery may be an illusion was the headline on one of its main analysis articles, which pointed out that the world of 2014 was not very dissimilar to the world of 2004 – when (we now […]
As the weather turns and we move toward the Summer months, it’s natural for all of us to look forward to forthcoming holidays and some time away somewhere nice! Foreign finance is a notoriously troublesome area, with poor exchange rates on overseas credit card transactions being just one of several fairly recent high profile examples […]