A happy retirement doesn’t just happen by itself. You’ve got to make it happen, and that involves lots of careful planning and asking yourself what you really want from your post-working life. The most obvious answer to that question is money, as we’ll all want financial security when we retire. But that’s not all. We’ll …
Ageing and death aren’t easy subjects to think about, but as we get older, they’re topics that it would be foolish to ignore. The average life expectancy in the UK is continuing to increase, which means many more of us might struggle to manage our own affairs and remain independent in the future. That in …
According to the latest Forbes Rich List, the richest person in the world is Jeff Bezos, founder and, until recently, CEO of Amazon. Forbes estimates Jeff Bezos’ wealth at $177bn (£133bn), which puts him ahead of those other well-known billionaires, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. These days it is easy to keep score …
There cannot be anyone reading this article who hasn’t heard of COP26, the conference on climate change and global warming which took place in Glasgow in the first two weeks of November. (If you didn’t know, COP stands for Conference of the Parties – those countries which signed the original UN Convention on Climate Change …
In September Germany went to the polls to elect a new government – and a successor to Angela Merkel, who had decided not to seek a fifth term as Chancellor. The result was inconclusive. The Social Democrats (SPD) topped the poll with 25.7% of the vote and a provisional 206 seats in the Reichstag, with …
At the beginning of March Chancellor Rishi Sunak presented his Budget. His aim: to chart a course out of the economic damage wrought by the pandemic. A year earlier he had said he would do “whatever it takes” to protect jobs and businesses. Twelve months on, with Government borrowing breaking all records, it is clear …
Whichever side you were on in the Brexit debate there was little doubt about one of the central arguments: leaving the EU would free the UK to do its own trade deals with countries and trading organisations around the world. At the end of January the BBC reported that the UK was applying to join …
In his 8 July summer statement, Chancellor Rishi Sunak confirmed that the stamp duty threshold will be immediately raised to £500,000 in England and Northern Ireland, in what some have dubbed the ‘stamp duty holiday’. The rise in threshold lasts until 31 March 2021 and will apply to both first-time buyers and previous owners. Sunak …
Financial planning… Isn’t that based on cold, hard facts and scientific reasoning? Surely feelings and emotions don’t have much to do with investing? We think they do. And here’s why. A little thing called human behaviour gets involved, you see. Only it’s not so little. Human beings are highly complex systems, motivated by many different factors …
The 50p has been in circulation for over fifty years. It was the world’s first seven-sided coin and was introduced to replace the ten shilling note. The humble 50p was no stranger to controversy upon its entry into the pockets of the population, with one headline, back in the 60s, referring to it as ‘a …
