In this blog:
Get the size right – too big can be catastrophic
Getting the size wrong can be fatal as well
Rachel Reeves and the Lifetime Allowance Show
ISAs, or Individual Savings Accounts, have been around for over 20 years – since Google had its debut and Bill Clinton was impeached. Rewind to 1999, and the Chancellor Gordon Brown introduced the product in the hope of encouraging us to save more for the future. Since then, they’ve become an essential part of many a financial plan.
One of the key aims of the ISA was to make saving simple. However, as with many things finance-related, successive governments have tinkered with parts of ISAs, added new products and altered limits. The net result is that picking an ISA product and understanding how to make the most of your allowance is not quite as simple as it was initially meant to be!
Our free, 12-page essential guide to ISAs talks you through what an ISA is, the different types of ISAs and why should you choose one.
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The Telegraph runs a weekly column called the Telegraph Money Makeover – readers write in if they are seeking help with their finances and the journalist of the day contacts firms like ours to ask if we’d like to write in with recommendations in return for getting name-checked in the paper (we’ve been there several times over the last few years)…
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In this blog:
The 5 ways to get income from your pension
Bonds at that mythical 5%
Never pay full rate 40% or 45% income tax again
In this blog:
Question 1 – do you need your income guaranteed or not?
Question 2 – is this an area of your expertise?
Possible vs probable vs guaranteed
The most important element of the objective
In this blog:
The $12.5 million idea
Moneyball for pensions
We are data analysts
Good recipe, but what’s the cake like?
So long, farewell
And Alan did run
Almost Methuselah
News comes that Britain cleans up in the first ever litter picking World Cup. A UK team were crowned champions in Japan after collecting 83 kilos of rubbish in just 45 minutes…
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In this blog:
“Is the manager in?”
You don’t need to calculate the distance to the sun, remember Pythagoras, or measure the visibility to see the horizon.
Do you have £1 million?
It is only a few years ago now that the cash till in our local was nothing more than a wooden drawer slung under the rear counter. No one paid by card. John, the tenant landlord, would work out his cellar order with notebook and pencil and phone it in…
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“I don’t have to pretend to like the theatre or foreign holidays and I can spend all afternoon in the pub with my pals.”
So says Marcus Berkman in his book - Still a Bit of Snap in The Old Celery - published Thursday this week…
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There are many good reasons to invest rather than just ‘save’ money – and before your imagination runs away with you, we are not talking investment aka the Wolf of Wall Street. That said, at one end of the scale investing can, indeed, provide an opportunity to increase your net worth or perhaps make you independently wealthy. However, the reality is that most of us would be more than happy at the prospect of knowing we’ll have a decent financial umbrella or of being able to retire comfortably or sooner than we’d planned. Investing can
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In this blog:
Asset rich, and cash poor
Tontine, not Tonto
Lifetime Allowance - a note from Martin
Everyone, it seems, has a point of view about the latest and last Beatles release.
The Guardian put it this way:
“A moody, reflective piano ballad, it’s clearly never going to supplant Strawberry Fields Forever or A Day in the Life in the affections of Beatles fans, but it’s a better song than Free as a Bird or Real Love…”
In this blog:
Don’t ignore the objective and debate the detail
Starting with the basics
Two rules of thumb that investors should accept and not debate
Why doesn’t everyone do this?
One for the bucket list:
‘Coloured cottons hang in the air. Charming cobras in the square. Striped djellabas we can wear…’ A description of Marrakesh by Crosby, Stills and Nash written in 1969 and just as true today.
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The internet can be a wonderful thing, and we think that the site at visualcapitalist.com has some interesting compilations of statistics. Here’s one that sticks out: if you’ve ever wondered if the French really are the work-shy-gilets-jaunes who retire as soon as they’ve learned to grow vines in the garden, well…
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Depending on which research you read, dyslexia affects between 10 and 20% of people. The spread is wide because of the number of people who remain undiagnosed. I can relate to this because, until my son was diagnosed, I had no idea I was so cursed…or blessed too.
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Born in the wake of WW2, baby boomers are the first generation of Britons since the act of union 300 years ago not conscripted to fight. The history of conflict, of course, goes back way beyond then. The Crusades, or Holy Wars started in 1096…
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