Category: Financial Advice

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.

So the car insurance battle continued today with the help of Ziya.

As mentioned in there commercials, Direct Line and NFU are not on the comparison websites, so I rang them this morning. I’m not surprised they aren’t, they both gave me quotes of over £1,500.

Again I don’t see how this is justified when I have had no incident in the last 12 months, well touch wood, for many years.

So looking at the comparison sites, I ended up choosing Hastings Direct, as that came in at £718, so just over a £100 increase.

Yes you expect an increase, that’s just how it is, but NOT by nearly doubling it. It shouldn’t be like this every year, having to hunt around for the best price, it’s as if they don’t want you as a customer.

This morning I received the email I was dreading regarding car insurance, after reading some horror stories throughout the year with the ridiculous increases.

Sure enough, when I logged on to the Tesco portal, the car insurance had gone up from £613 to £1,145. An increase of £532, so not far short of doubling it. How can that be justified?

I haven’t had an incident in the last year. Just complete madness,

I rang them up and all they could get me down to was £938. We are also Tesco club card members which is reducing the cost already.  I said that was still a too bigger jumper and would look around.

It’s down to an increase in accidents and cost to repair electric cars, so I can only see this going up with the goal to move to electric cars.

So with the help of Ziya, I decided to look around.

Look out for a further blog update with the final outcome

After the chancellor autumn statement yesterday afternoon and receiving a document from my financial advisor. I asked if there would be any impact on us.

This was the response I got back –

“The NI cut will help Claire as of January. Should be a decent monthly difference to take home pay.

Savings rates are looking good, with Cash ISAs and Premium Bonds preferable (as tax is starting to touch on people’s earned interest). Largely, with inflation cooling as hoped, interest rates should have peaked, then we’ve seen some a very good turnaround this month for you portfolio (4%ish just during November) helped by some positive comments from the US Federal Reserve backed up by the Bank of England recently. So sentiment seems to have moved a lot and the outlook is improving. Fingers crossed for a better year ahead.”

Hopefully this will be case after a bumpy ride this year with the markets.

Happy to recommend my financial advisor too.

Today I had a financial review and in the most part, everything is going all OK which is all you can ask for with the mess going on around the world.

Recovered from the bad ending to 2022, due to the scare from the mini budget from the shortest rein prime minster.

Login required to see this posting.

This was feedback I had from the market analyst.

“2022 was a dreadful year for the fixed interest market as it suffered record breaking losses caused by the sky rocketing interest rates. We were meaningfully underweight but with hindsight should have been even more aggressive in this position. Now with interest rates appearing to be nearing what is expected to be their peaks we have moved towards a more benchmark neutral position. This repositioning of our asset allocation is behind the purchase of the additional units of Robeco.

Robeco has been our best performing fixed interest collectives’ year to date, performing relatively well because it has been positioned to be less sensitive to increasing interest rates (duration).”

I’ll be honest, I’m still not sure about Robeco, happy to be proven wrong.