Life insurance and family protection
LOCKDOWN has given us all the chance to sort out many unsorted items. Buying another jet washer to wash your jet washer was a step too far, perhaps! We have had many calls asking about life insurance and protecting families over the last two months, so I’ll endeavor to answer those questions here. I asked […]
Incentive investing – when do you pay your adviser more?
SHOULD you pay your financial adviser an incentive fee that charges more when they do well and less when they do not? That’s a good question, so let’s look at its pros/cons. A better starting point for all investors to look at is the actual benefit achieved by their adviser in pointing them to an Investment […]
Some investing is based on Titanic style management
FOLLOWING last week’s column on passive/index investing, we had a number of questions I would like to follow up on. Index investing arose from the view that the huge volume of institutional investing is effectively ‘the market’, so the investor simply benefits from the returns less the fees (expensive ones at that). There was an […]
Algorithmic selling risk of your money
OVER my last 32 years, I have seen many a ‘latest fashion’ encourage investors to run toward emptying their bank accounts. There have been financial advisers with scruples, with a full understanding of their own competency and limitations, and there have been others. The last few months have naturally brought up the passive investing debate. […]
Finance support for businesses in Covid time
THE Government’s ‘finance support’ or bounce back loan scheme has been met with much applause after the poorly thought through and disorganised original CBILS scheme. I wrote about its extraordinary initial flaws at design, and like many commentators, I was stunned to find some banks offering loan rates of 12 per cent, coupled with a […]
£750 billion in dormant pensions – how much is yours?
YOU may have heard the term ‘frozen’ pension. There are two meanings to this. If you have paid National Insurance contributions, and are expecting a state pension but emigrate to another country, the UK has a policy in certain countries (Canada, Australia) where they no longer increase your state pension by inflation. As each inflationary […]
Yesterday’s lottery numbers as an investment
WATCHING the latest series of After Life, and the moment Ricky Gervais manages to persuade the owner of the newspaper not to sell (sorry if I spoiled that) . . . it goes like this: “How much would you sell it for?” . . “Half a million”. “What would you do with that”? “Buy a […]
Beating debt and covid
THERE are evolutionary moments in life . . . when you are in secondary school thinking how easy it would be to sit back in your primary school desk; when you look at how complicated life is as a house owner, and how A-levels were actually a doddle; when you realise how debt just makes […]
Think of your finances as a leaking bucket and start plugging the holes
IN the next of our taking care of finances in lockdown, I’ll just look at some of the basic tips for making the most of your money. One involves the term ‘leaky buckets’. My late father had explained how he used to fill a bath from a well, which was a reasonable hill walk. By […]
Taking control of your money in lockdown
HOPEFULLY a few of you managed to bag the shares I mentioned in the column last week? Most of them were up around 30 per cent in the next two days – a nice light in dark times. Keeping your head in difficult times is a tough task, but pays dividends, something many large UK […]
The Covid-19 economy
The Covid-19 economy – it’s been a week studying mathematical analysis on coronavirus, to ascertain where this is all bringing us, and how that will impact economies and investment markets. Markets plummeted, then bounced, and we are all looking at where the next movement will be. Do I leave the market, sit tight, or do […]
Loan scheme is 11.36 per cent above residential lending
I’LL be sticking with guidance through the coronavirus over the next few weeks as its turmoil knocks businesses and family’s globes off their axis – today I’ll focus on the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loans Scheme (CBILS). And in short, if you can avoid it, don’t do it. New Order had the hit record of ‘Love […]