Category: Uncategorized
Decemberâs least surprising headline duly arrived on January 1st: Deal reached on Fiscal Cliff. For the whole of December (barely pausing for Christmas) President Obama and Congress argued over the deal needed to avoid the âFiscal Cliff,â the raft of tax rises that would have been a body blow to Middle America and impacted severely on the US economy and â by implication â the wider world economy.
Category: Uncategorized
Christmas is over for another year, which means itâs not long â hopefully â before the first signs of Spring appear and we start to turn our attention to the end of the financial year. For many investors and savers this means making sure they contribute to an Individual Savings Account (or ISA, as theyâre more popularly known).
Category: Uncategorized
When you look ahead to 2013, your glass could be half full or half empty. In the UK the lights have just gone out in the last Comet store. And yet Nissan are pumping ÂŁ250m into Sunderland to build a luxury small car and create hundreds of jobs.
The employment data in the US has been consistently moving in the right direction for the last 27 months. But every 20 months the country finds itself another $1tn dollars in debt.
Category: Uncategorized
There has been a significant growth in the promotion and marketing of short-term âPaydayâ loan schemes recently. The morality of these schemes remains an open debate, where one side say that such schemes fulfill a need for people in hardship, in a time of recession, whilst from the other side there is powerful argument that such schemes and their widespread promotion make vulnerable people short of cash, even more vulnerable.
Category: Uncategorized
Historically, many people chose to contract out of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme using a personal pension scheme. Put simply, this meant that the money that would have gone into the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) went into their personal pensions instead â effectively, they were swapping known benefits from the Government for unknown (but potentially greater) benefits from their own pension scheme.
Category: Uncategorized
The annual allowance for tax-privileged pension saving was reduced from ÂŁ255,000 to ÂŁ50,000 in the 2011/12 tax year. Now the lifetime allowance on money that can be accrued in a pension fund and still receive tax relief, for tax years 2012-13 onwards, will be reduced and is set to fall from ÂŁ1.8 million to ÂŁ1.5 million from April 2012.
