NEWS
As the end of the UK tax year approaches, it’s time for a dive into your finances to make sure you’ve taken advantage of all the available opportunities as well as fulfilling your obligations. Here’s an easy comprehensive list of 20 things to check for personal and business taxes as April approaches.
It doesn’t take much searching to find short term deposit rates paying 5% or more. There have been lots of knock on effects of the lower returns from deposits and borrowers have benefitted from ‘cheap’ money.
Woosh! Who’s enjoyed watching interest rates on savings rocket? Of course, if you’re a mortgage-payer these are very challenging times.
When people talk about investing, the conversation usually centres around returns – this is the exciting bit. Which fund is performing best? Which market is rising fastest? What opportunities are available today? How much of a return might I make! What often receives far less attention is risk and how to think about it in the real world, i.e. how it impacts day to day.
I am writing this because most families meet the care system for the first time in exactly this way: in the middle of a crisis. That is the worst possible moment to be learning the rules. A little understanding now is worth a great deal later.
In his book Pioneering Portfolio Management, the former CIO of the Yale endowment, David Swensen, helped popularise the idea that long-term portfolios should extend beyond traditional stocks and bonds to include assets linked to the real economy and alternative assets such as hedge funds. First published in 2000, the book drew on lessons from investing across a range of market environments, including periods of elevated inflation.
For most of the past two decades, Capital Gains Tax (CGT) has been a relatively peripheral concern for the majority of investors. The annual exempt amount – the amount of gains you can realise each year free of tax – was generous enough that many clients could rebalance portfolios, fund ISA contributions, and take profits without a CGT liability arising at all. That position has changed significantly.