A House of Lords committee has been highly critical of the government’s proposals on inheritance tax (IHT) and pensions. Cynics might expect members of the House of Lords to have more than a passing interest in the Chancellor’s plans to bring unused pension funds within the scope of IHT. Whether or not that view is […]
The 6th April brought a variety of changes to the tax rules. The start of the tax year (Monday 6 April) heralded a variety of changes to tax and pension rules, few of them welcome. Dividend tax The rate of tax on dividends will increase by two percentage points if you pay tax at basic […]
Are you missing out on tax relief for your pension contributions? A ‘Supplementary forecast information release’ from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) on ‘Costing of charging NICs on salary sacrificed pension contributions’ may sound like a cure for insomnia. It is certainly not short of acronyms beloved of pension nerds, such as OpRA, RAS […]
As a means of drawing income in retirement, annuities have made a comeback, and for good reasons. In 2014, the then Chancellor (and now podcaster), George Osborne, pulled a rabbit out of the Budget hat that nobody had seen coming. He announced the ending of the effective requirement for personal pension plans to be converted […]
New research from the Office for National Statistics casts a different light on life expectancy. “How long am I going to live?’ is one of those questions that we tend to pay more attention to, the older we are. One quick way to find an answer is to use the Office for National Statistics (ONS) […]
We often refer to the way we invest as being a systematic approach. By this, we simply mean that we follow a disciplined, rules‑based, unemotional process. Markets move up and down all the time, and it can be tempting to try to react to every headline or short‑term change. Yet history shows that repeatedly guessing […]
