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Estate Planning – too important to put on hold All too often, people put off estate planning. This is understandable as, rather than preparing for the here and now, it requires you to consider what will happen when your life is over, hardly something most of us rush to contemplate. Consequently, estate planning often becomes […]

In 2022, most of the world’s major share indices had their worst year since 2008, but the UK’s FTSE 100 became a star performer.   Yes, the table is correct. In the year of three Prime Ministers, four Chancellors, a catastrophic ‘mini-Budget’ and double-digit inflation, the FTSE 100 (or UK stock market) became one of […]

The frozen personal allowance may be overtaken by the new state pension in only a few years, proving the income tax screw is well and truly tightening. The new state pension, payable to eligible individuals who reached their State Pension age after 5 April 2016, will rise by 10.1% to £203.85 a week in April […]

If your employer pays for the fuel in your company car, it may cost you more than you expect.  As the Autumn Statement was not a Budget, detailed publications that would normally emerge as the Chancellor sat down have taken time to appear. For example, the HMRC projections of how many more capital gains tax […]

Inflation surged in 2022, but can it reverse in 2023?    Forecasters of inflation were way off target for 2022. For example: In December 2021, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee said “CPI inflation was expected to remain around 5% through the majority of the winter period, and peak at around 6% in April […]

From January, National Savings & Investments (NS&I) will increase its premium bond prize fund rate to 3% and reduce £25 prizes, instead increasing the number of higher-value prizes.  In January 2022, about 98% of all the premium bond prizes paid out by NS&I were just £25. You were lucky if you even won that amount, […]