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…
Read moreAuthor: MartinJP
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…
Read moreAs the end of the tax year nears, remember the 5 April is a multi-faceted deadline. In 2017, the tax year ends on Wednesday 5 April, over a week before Easter. The Budget is almost a month earlier (8 March), but that should not affect most tax year end actions. As a reminder, here are…
Read moreTransfer values from final salary pension schemes ended 2016 15% higher than where they started, according to Xafinity Consulting, a pension and employee benefit consultant. The increase was largely due to changes in long-term interest rates: as rates fall, so transfer values increase (and vice versa). Long-term rates dropped sharply in the wake of the…
Read moreAt first sight, the results from the world's main share markets in 2016 appear mixed, but that's before currency effects are considered. Index 2016 Change FTSE 100 +14.4 FTSE All-Share +12.5% Dow Jones Industrial +13.4% Standard & Poor's 500 +9.5% Nikkei 225 + 0.4% Euro Stoxx 50 (€) + 0.7% Shanghai Composite - 12.3% MSCI…
Read moreFrom April, the residence nil rate band comes into being. It was nearly two years ago that the Conservatives’ manifesto for the 2015 election promised to “take the family home out of tax by increasing the effective Inheritance Tax threshold for married couples and civil partners to £1 million.” The legislation which starts the first…
Read moreIt may feel like Mr Hammond’s Autumn Statement was only a few days ago, but shortly before Christmas the Treasury announced that the Spring Budget will be on Wednesday 8 March. In theory, this will be the last Budget to take place in spring, as in November Mr Hammond announced he would be reverting to…
Read moreOn 15 December, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) raised its key short term interest rate by 0.25%, to a range between 0.5% and 0.75%. It had made the same increase 12 months previously. When the Christmas 2015 rate rise occurred, the central bank was implicitly expecting to raise rates four times during 2016. However, a…
Read moreAutomatic enrolment has reached a new landmark, but the path from 2017 onwards could be challenging. When automatic enrolment (AE) into workplace pensions started in October 2012, there were some doubts about how successful it would be. A little over four years later, few would argue that AE has not been a success, at least…
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Pryor Portfolio Management always take an extended period of time off at Christmas time as people are generally too busy to see us! We use it as an opportunity to undergo importance maintenance work within the business and recharge our batteries ready for what already looks like a busy 2017. In usual PPM fashion we…
Read moreThe Treasury has changed its mind about allowing the sale of pension annuities. When pensions flexibility was announced in March 2014, one of the inevitable criticisms was that the reform came too late for those who had already turned their pension pot into an annuity. A year later the then Chancellor attempted to respond to…
Read moreOn the day of the referendum, a pound would buy you nearly $1.50. It dropped sharply in the wake of the vote and then spent about three months churning between roughly $1.35 and $1.30. October produced another leg down to the $1.22 area as a ‘hard’ Brexit began to seem more likely. An 18%+ fall…
Read moreInflation rose to 1% in September, but that will not be the end of the story. Last month a spat between Tesco and Unilever over the pricing of products under a new contract saw Marmite temporarily removed from the shelves of Tesco’s internet shopping website. The two parties resolved the issue quickly once it hit…
Read moreThe pre-Autumn Statement rumour mill is suggesting a radical reform of pension contribution tax relief. Could tax relief for pension contributions be based on your age rather than the rate of income tax you pay? It may sound strange, but one idea doing the rounds is that tax relief on pension contributions should become a…
Read moreThe government has published an independent review on the state pension system. There was a time when it was all so simple: men drew their state pension from age 65 and women from age 60. That all started to change in the mid-1990s, when the Pensions Act 1995 set in train a phased increase in…
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Buy To Let - A Future Tax Trap A close reading of the summer Finance Bill has highlighted a further tax consequence of the government's moves to limit tax relief for interest on buy-to-let mortgages. The July Budget included an attack on individual investors in buy-to-let residential property. As well as abolishing the 10% wear-and-tear…
Read moreThe Chancellor has announced the date of the Autumn Statement. In late July, the Chancellor announced that the results of the Spending Review would be announced on 25 November. At the time he made no reference to the Autumn Statement, probably because the focus was still on his July Budget. However, in the beginning of…
Read moreNew EU rules about succession came into force on 17 August. If you own a holiday home on the continent, new EU regulations on cross-border succession could be important to you, even though the UK has opted out of the legislation. The new regulations will allow you to choose for your overseas property to be…
Read moreThe summer holiday months was anything but relaxing for investors in UK shares. As well as being the title of an Edna O'Brien novel, "August is a wicked month" probably sums up how many investors felt about the month. It was all going rather unexcitingly around the middle of the month, when the combination of…
Read moreTaking pension protection - yes or no? You can now opt for Individual Protection 2014 to protect your pension benefits. But should you? The lifetime allowance (LTA) effectively sets the maximum tax-efficient value of all your pension benefits. In its first iteration, in April 2006, the standard LTA was set at £1.5m. It then gradually…
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