Blog
We personalise the advice we give to our clients as much as possible. Our financial planning process is all about collaboration. We seek to understand where you are, what you want from life, and any concerns you have. Your goals and priorities are unique to you. Once we have done some analysis, we will have
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Our Investment Committee recently convened. Its responsibility is to oversee the investments we recommend. In other words, governance. An essential part of this is to review our investment philosophy which we covered in an earlier post. Our investment philosophy has developed somewhat since then, but the central pillars remain the same. What is your investment
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Economic growth Signs of slower growth than some had originally expected, amid supply constraints and a Covid-19 resurgence, have led to lower growth forecasts for the United States. Expectations are that the US should reach its pre-pandemic growth trend in the first quarter of 2022, rather than late 2021. Across the euro area, hospitalisations appear to have
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In September 2020, annual inflation in the UK was running at 0.5% on the CPI measure and 1.1% using the old RPI yardstick. At the time price rises were the least of our worries. 12 months later and inflation has become a hot topic. The latest (August) figures are 3.2% CPI and 4.8% RPI. The
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Those in control of how to extract money from their business broadly have three main options. These are to take out the money either as salary, dividends or by making employer pension contributions. The Health and Social Care Levy and the increase in dividend tax rates both make the extraction of profits via pension contributions
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The University of Manchester Research has published a report entitled: Pensions and Divorce: Exploratory Analysis of Quantitative Data. The report has found that, within couples, men have substantially more private pension wealth than women. This poses challenges should they divorce. The researchers looked at the pension wealth of almost 30,000 people over the age of
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We have written previously about how employees exchanging part of their salary and/or bonus for increased pension contributions has become common. We explained how this can be far more attractive than the employee making a direct pension contribution on his/her own behalf. Attractions of salary sacrifice Contributions paid out of an employee’s after-tax pay are
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The social care announcement on 7 September 2021 increased both national insurance (NICs) and dividend tax from 2022/23. In addition, the March Budget revised corporation tax rates from 2023/24. The combined effect of these announcements might shift the decision of whether to take a dividend or not from your business. We have looked at some examples to see where these shifts might have taken
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To begin with, it is worth a quick reminder of the current social care position in England: (Wales, N. Ireland and, in particular Scotland, have their own variations on the theme): There is a £23,250 capital means test ceiling, above which all care costs must be met by the individual: the self-funding route. For those with wealth between
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Morningstar has published updated research as part of its annual Mind The Gap study on how much of market returns US investors get. The headline is those investors get 1.7% less than they should. What is the reason behind the difference? The explanation the report gives for this is that the investors mistime their buys
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