What can financial planning help you? Financial planning isn’t just reserved for the especially wealthy. Whether we’re aware of it or not, all of us are on a financial planning journey and nearly all of us will want to make the most of our money and that includes putting it to good use by investing […]
Man has the hardest job of all, the job of making decisions on incomplete data. Henry Kuttner When market returns are kind, as they have been in recent times, it can be too easy to forget that bad times in investing will come along at some stage, leading to large and/or protracted falls in value. […]
Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first Budget was a significant one in all senses. “…this Budget delivers a large, sustained increase in spending, taxation, and borrowing.” So said the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in the first paragraph of its overview of the Autumn Budget. The numbers are indeed large: spending is up by almost £70 billion […]
HMRC is uncharacteristically keen to give money away, reminding young adults again that they may be due unclaimed child trust funds (CTFs). The amount still to be paid out comes to just under £1.4 billion. As the UK settles under its first Labour government in 14 years, there is a certain irony that one of […]
New statistics show that cash ISAs remain a popular investment. Every autumn HMRC publishes a set of annual savings statistics, setting out detailed information about individual savings accounts (ISAs), lifetime individual savings accounts (LISAs), child trust funds (CTFs) and Help to Save. Unsurprisingly, ISAs dominate, with by far the largest amounts, both in terms of […]
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has been crunching the numbers on the adequacy of pension contributions. One of the unremarked government successes of the 2010s was the introduction of automatic enrolment of employees into pension schemes. The first automatic enrolment contributions were made in October 2012 under the coalition government. However, the thinking behind […]
A third deadline for topping up State Pension entitlement is now coming into view. “Don’t it always seem to goThat you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?” The words of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, recorded over half a century ago, always come to mind when deadlines loom. Whether it is filing tax […]
Protecting What Matters Most Financial resilience is the ability to recover quickly from unexpected financial shocks. Many of us insure our homes and cars without really thinking about it, but far fewer insure their lives and incomes. Savings can and do help in the short-term. But what happens when they run out? Or if an […]
Rebalancing is the practice of realigning the components of a portfolio of investments back to a target allocation from which it has drifted away. Naturally, the process is contrarian and results in selling the things that have done well and buying more of what has done less well. To some, this may feel painful, but […]
