As 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…
Read moreThe third quarter of 2016 was not the meltdown it threatened to be after the referendum. The final days of the second quarter of 2016 were dominated by the fall-out from the outcome of the referendum on 23 June. It was, to put it mildly, a volatile time for investment markets. However, for all the…
Read more2016 has certainly been a year of surprises with this morning just adding to the long list which includes Brexit, new prime ministers, Leicester City winning the Premiership...... Equity markets are selling off across the world as each one opens and bonds are rallying along with gold, in a nutshell its risk off; big style.…
Read moreThere has been a difference of opinion on the role of property in retirement planning between the Bank of England’s Chief Economist and a former Deputy Governor. Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, caused a few raised eyebrows recently when in a Sunday Times interview he suggested that “property is a better…
Read moreThe Treasury has confirmed that the Autumn Statement will be on 23 November. When George Osborne was replaced as Chancellor in July, his successor, Philip Hammond, deliberately avoided taking any action. He left the immediate economic response to Mark Carney and the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, which duly cut interest rates…
Read moreThe previous Chancellor’s plans to launch a Lifetime ISA (LISA) have been given a fresh breath of life. In his final Budget last March, one of the surprises George Osborne produced was the Lifetime ISA, known as the LISA to everyone except HM Treasury. As a reminder, LISA’s main features were to be: •It would…
Read moreThe next stage of the opening up of the Chinese stock markets has been agreed. Many major companies incorporated in China have dual share classes: A Shares, which is the main share category, are denominated in renminbi, the Chinese currency. They are listed on the Chinese stock exchanges, the major ones being Shanghai and Shenzhen,…
Read moreNew statistics have been published showing just how much has been withdrawn in the first year of pensions freedom. In August, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) published data showing how much had been withdrawn from pension arrangements in the 12 months to April 2016, the first year in which the pension flexibility reforms introduced…
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