magazine archive
magazine archive
Personal Finance
Transferring a pension – how and why you may want to do it
Thursday 14 Sep 2023Tracking down your lost pension pots and consolidating them into one place is a good financial admin task to tick off your list – if it suits your circumstances. A £100,000 pension pot switched from a product with total charges of 1.5% to a platform where charges total 0.75% could be worth £11,000...
Boom time for cash savers – but you need to be smart
Thursday 07 Sep 2023It’s boom time for cash savers. The best easy access account is now paying interest of 5% according to Moneyfacts. If you had forecast that two years ago, you would have been laughed out of town. But not all savers are benefiting from ballooning interest rates. Around £250 billion sits in accounts...
Find out how to build an investment portfolio with trackers
Thursday 31 Aug 2023Investing has transformed over the past several decades, and one of the key innovations driving this change has been the emergence of passive funds. Characterised by their low fees and simplicity, passive funds (including exchange-traded funds) provide investors with an effective way to gain...
Understand the basics on inflation and how interest rates help curb it
Thursday 24 Aug 2023The headlines have been filled with news of sky-high inflation and the Bank of England’s subsequent interest rate rises. But we thought it would be handy to go through exactly why inflation is high, how interest rates are meant to curb it and whether it’s actually working. Why is inflation high? In...
Lessons from a decade of AIM shares being allowed in an ISA
Thursday 17 Aug 2023It’s now 10 years since the government allowed AIM shares to be held in a stocks and shares ISA, opening the door to investors protecting themselves not just from income and capital gains tax, but from inheritance tax too. That’s because many AIM companies, though not all, are free from inheritance...
What are the tax implications of having a side hustle like selling on Ebay or Etsy?
Thursday 10 Aug 2023Lots of people are trying to generate more money and alternative incomes during the cost-of-living crisis, but they need to make sure they are up to date on the tax rules around earning extra money to avoid the taxman asking for unpaid dues. More than one in three adults has more than one income...
Can I give money from my pension to charity at death?
Thursday 27 Jul 2023I am thinking about how I can make bequests from my estate to my favourite charities and wondered if I can gift some of my pension in this way and whether or not this makes sense, given my estate might have to pay inheritance tax. I’m interested in the pluses and minuses around giving money to...
Why a mid-life financial MOT is absolutely vital in your 50s
Thursday 20 Jul 2023Almost half of pension savers in their 50s and 60s have not considered how they will access their retirement pot, according to new research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Its analysis suggests lots of us are heading towards retirement unprepared, with little consideration for the financial...
How to beat the banks as the gap between savings and mortgage rates surges
Thursday 13 Jul 2023High street banks stand accused of short-changing savers by not passing on the full interest rate rise since the Bank of England hiked rates. Now the Government, regulators and news sites are all focused on the gap between what banks are charging on mortgage rates and what they are offering cash...
Should you overpay your mortgage or take advantage of 5.9% rates on cash?
Thursday 06 Jul 2023The mortgage market is in a state of turmoil, as deals are being regularly withdrawn and replaced with contracts carrying more punitive interest rates. This has been driven by the Bank of England tightening monetary policy, but also more recently some bad inflationary data which has caused the...