Blog

Dividends keep growing in 2017

UK companies paid out a record amount in dividends in the second quarter of this year. At a time when there is much heated debate about whether the Bank of England should double its base rate to 0.5%, it can be easy to forget the much higher income yield available from UK shares. While most…

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197 – No summer budget…..but

The general election left the future of many spring Budget announcements up in the air, but that situation may soon change When Theresa May announced her snap election in April, it threw a major spanner in the previous month's Budget. There was no time to pass the 776 pages of Finance Bill before parliament shut…

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192 – And after the election

There is unfinished business for the new government to deal with. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. However, when it comes to general elections, there is plenty of history to suggest that tax increases are more likely in the first Budget to occur after the polls have closed. From a politician's…

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189 – The NASDAQ hits 6000

The market most associated with US technology shares reached a new high in April. You may be old enough to remember that the end of the 20th century was marked by a surge in the value of technology shares in the United States. Many of these were traded on the NASDAQ market, which became synonymous…

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188 – A budget of non starters

The Spring Budget has become a victim of the snap election. Philip Hammond has not had much luck with what he said would be his first and last Spring Budget. His proposal to increase Class 4 national insurance contributions from April 2018 survived only a week before being dropped. Then when the Finance Bill was…

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185 – Salary Sacrifice under the microscope

New rules for taxing many salary sacrifice arrangements came into force from 6 April. One of the employment trends of recent years has been to make employee remuneration more flexible. Instead of pay and, if you were lucky, a company car and healthcare, ‘cafeteria remuneration’ has become common, giving employees the choice of sacrificing pay…

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178 – HMRC – The Ultra rich and the not so rich

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee thinks that the “government must take a tougher stance on taxing the very wealthy.” In 2009, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) set a specialist team to focus on the tax affairs of high net worth individuals (HNWIs is the jargon). At the time, HNWIs were defined as people with net assets…

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177 – Inflation

For much of 2015, inflation barely existed. On the government’s chosen measure, the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), annual inflation oscillated between 0.3% and -0.1%. 2016 was a rather different story: the starting point was 0.3%, but by December prices were rising by 1.6% a year. The sharp rise over the year is mainly the result…

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