How should you maximise your pension contributions to minimise your tax bill?
Savings
Do you do Premium Bonds? Should you? The answer largely comes down to your tax bracket and the size of your stash.
Remortgaging in the midst of the Mini Budget madness unnerved me, but I’m still not paying it off just yet…
We tackle the thorny old problem of SIPPs vs ISAs, and as usual there’s no clear winner…
Has your pension just become the ultimate estate planning vehicle for the wealthy masses?
Genuinely exciting developments today in the typically somnolent world of pensions. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has announced he’s scrapping the Lifetime Allowance for Pensions. Hunt is also significantly increasing the pension annual allowances. As per Hunt’s 2023 Spring Budget: The government will remove the Lifetime Allowance charge from 6 April 2023, before fully abolishing the Lifetime [...]
Why your broker is happy for you to leave a big chunk of your portfolio lying around in cash…
Everyone knows to put money aside in a cash savings just in case something goes wrong… don’t they?
Rising interest rates mean you need to think about paying tax on your bank account earnings…
Every year seems weird these days. Maybe it’s all down to the coming singularity. Certainly 2022’s quadruple whammy of war, drought, inflation, and plunging equity and bond prices has provided enough contrast to please even a late-stage Picasso. Crops wither while inflation runs wild! Energy prices soar while portfolios plummet! Or maybe it’s just the [...]
Cash ISAs no longer pay the best interest rates, but they can still be the right product in certain circumstances
Cash savings rates have been dreadful over the past few years, with many accounts offering rates as low as 0.01% AER. (That’s equivalent to 1p per year for every £100 saved. Don’t spend it all at once!) This low-interest environment has punished many with a frugal mindset, but most obviously those who’ve kept a large [...]
A few years ago I was the proud manager of multiple bank accounts. Pretty surprising, considering I’m hardly the most industrious rodent in the rat race of work. In this post I’ll talk about how I ended up with so many bank accounts and what I learned. I’ll also share a few tips to help [...]
Sometime back in the 1990s I began putting all my earnings above the higher-rate tax threshold into my pension.