financial advice
After my meeting last week with my financial advisor and market advisor, I have asked my financial advisor to look into life insurance to cover if anything happened to me so that Claire is taken care off as you never know what is around the corner in life.
It’s not an easy subject to talk about death, but needs to be done when you want to protect the one’s you love.
Today I had the yearly financial review with Nikki and Graeme at Brewin Dolphin London office.
Overall everything is doing well with markets looking reasonable, with inflation finally back down in most countries and now looking for interest rates starting to be lower.
Obviously there are the troubles around the world, especially Ukraine and Israel, with the USA election coming up in November, so you never really know what’s going to happen.
Compared to the previous year, this one has been good, and just in the last week, when I check my pension portfolio, the last 3 years are now showing three green boxes for increase, where most of the time there had been at least 1 red box for decrease.
We then went for a lunch at The Origin City, which was very nice restaurant with excellent service and good food. Though I wouldn’t recommend the scallop starter, I mean 1 scallop, come on now.
Hopefully this will be the trend with the markets staying positive.
As mentioned in previous blog postings, I definitely recommend this service to make sure nothing is happening against your property.
It’s free and you are alerted if anything does happen and from looking across the internet, it does happen.
This afternoon, I took Claire for her mammogram.
It’s good that her company offer this, even if it’s goes on to her tax.
At least she can be checked to make sure everything is OK.
After yesterday’s budget, most likely the last one before the general election. I received a summary from my financial advisor.
These are the highlights.
a) The main rate of class 1 employee national insurance contributions (NICs) will be cut from 10% to 8% with effect from 6 April 2024 and the main rate of class 4 self-employed NICs will also be reduced from 8% to 6%.
b) The high income child benefit charge (HICBC) will be reformed, increasing the HICBC threshold to £60,000 from April 2024. The rate at which HICBC is charged will be halved so that child benefit is not fully withdrawn until individuals have an income of at least £80,000. HICBC will apply on a household rather than an individual basis by April 2026.
c) An additional UK individual savings account (ISA) will be created with a £5,000 allowance in addition to the current £20,000 ISA limit.
d) The higher rate of capital gains tax (CGT) for residential property disposals will be cut from 28% to 24% from 6 April 2024.
e) The furnished holiday lettings tax regime will be abolished from 6 April 2025.
f) The value added tax (VAT) registration threshold will rise from £85,000 to £90,000 from 1 April 2024. The deregistration threshold will rise from £83,000 to £88,000.
g) The non-UK domicile rules will be replaced, from 6 April 2025.
Considering this is the last budget before an election, it just shows the state of the country, as there is nothing really to shout home about and with the tax thresholds not changing, more people will actually be paying more tax in the next few years.
Nothing from the budget helped me at all.
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Always good to hear good news regarding finance.
Some feedback from my financial advisor.
“We’ve had quite a turnaround in Market sentiment this last few months, led by inflation and therefore interest rate expectations (which have dominated everything for a couple of years now). Very positively for November and December, which gave us overall a very good 2023 and we arrived into 2024 with a good outlook, albeit a slightly poor start in January has restrained some of that positivity.”
Just need the inflation rate to come down to force the interest rates down.
Plus all the war madness to end too, to make the markets even better.
As posted before, always happy to recommend my financial advisor.
Today Claire got an email regarding the gas price increases.
After discussing, we decided to go on to a new fix price tariff for the next two years.
This enabled us to get our monthly payment back below £100, but paying more than the tariff as we were in debit a bit. Hopefully with everything going on around the world, this will work out to a benefit for us.
So after the fun and games with the car insurance the other week, see previous posting; I wasn’t expecting this today.
I got a letter from the DVLA for the car tax payment and thought that was early, as we got the car in January and then I saw the amount and I thought this was a spam letter.
So I logged on the government website to pay and I got to the price section and yes my car tax was £560.
I rang them to find out why, but whilst waiting, I found something on the site and it was down to the value of the car. This had actually been in place since 2017, I thought they kept that hidden well.
The other great thing is, this is cost for the next 4 years as well, before it drops down to the normal tax, which is £180 at the moment. I thought having a hybrid car would reduce the tax.
There goes Claire’s Christmas presents.
