Breaking news from the UK budget – Chancellor Darling (right) has just announced that annual ISA allowances will increase with inflation in future years.
The ISA contribution allowance goes up to £10,200 from April 6th. In future years it will go up by inflation.
I’ll update this page with more detail when it’s released.
Whether we’ll see this legislation may depend on the results of the General Election, of course, but I doubt the Conservatives would rescind it.
With income taxes rising and pension reliefs being curbed for those on six-figure salaries, the UK’s high-earners are looking again at Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs).
Just this weekend there was this article on VCTs in The Sunday Times, and another in the Financial Times.
I won’t go exhaustively into the case for VCTs. If you’re not familiar with Venture Capital Trusts then please pop off and read those articles.
Don’t worry. We’ll wait.
Back? Great – you now know the main points:
In this article, I’ll focus instead on some of the risks of VCT investing that I think are often underplayed in these articles.
Todays’s blog of the week post comes from Tim of the ever erudite Psy-Fi blog.
Guest posting at Simoleon Sense, Tim (Richards, as we now discover) gives a whirlwind tour of behavioral investing and inefficient markets.
He points out that contrary to the nomenclature, the buying opportunity of a lifetime is a poorly named cliche – unless investing is to be dominated by ten-year olds.
From the Great Crash to World War 2 to the oil crisis in the 1970s to Black Monday in 1987, massive market dislocations actually seem to come around every ten years.
A lot of people say they want to earn more money, but when you talk to them in a few years time they’re not doing any better.
Most people don’t actually want to be rich. Certainly not enough to do whatever it takes to get there.
There’s no shame in that. Being wealthy has its downsides, and there’s much more to life than money.
Some people are too lazy to earn more money. They say they want to increase their salary, but they’re not actually prepared to do the extra work or take on the responsibility required.
Or else it’s not the very real risks of starting a business that holds them back, but inertia. They sit in front of their PC night after night ‘researching’, but there’s always just one more website to read, or one more funny pet video on YouTube.
Such people may also fear making the changes in themselves that are required to earn more money.
