2018 may have been a disappointing year for equities, but is shouldn’t have been a surprise December 2018 dished up a rather distasteful present for the holiday period. Many lines were written in the broadsheets about the global equity market falls, but were they really anything out of the ordinary? ‘Stock market slide in 2018 […]
In early December the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced the thresholds that should apply to automatic enrolment pension contributions from 6 April 2019. We say ‘should’ because, strictly speaking, they need final approval from the Secretary of State, although any change is extremely unlikely. There are three key levels to be aware of: […]
The time to resolve has returned. Have your New Year resolutions fallen by the wayside yet? You know, the ones about eating better, drinking less and exercising more. The problem is they all require you to make a change to your lifestyle, which is never easy, particularly in the dark days of mid-winter. Some […]
7 January marked the fifth anniversary of the tax on child benefits, an imposition that is still not widely understood. The High Income Child Benefit Charge (HICBC), to give child benefit tax its correct name, was introduced in a rush by George Osborne – so much so that it began three months before the start […]
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is aiming to expand pension coverage among the self-employed. Pension automatic enrolment has become a major success since it was launched nearly seven years ago, with almost 10 million people joining a workplace pension arrangement. Take-up rates have been much higher than some pundits had forecast – the […]
Life doesn’t always turn out as we’d hoped or planned. Almost 100 children suffer the loss of a parent every day in Britain. There are nearly 160,000 deaths from heart disease each year in the UK – an average of 435 people each day. In 2016, there were more than 163,000 deaths from cancer. Tailored […]
