Financial Planning

With changes to Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) expected in the Autumn Budget, one variant has come under heavy criticism from the Treasury Select Committee: the Lifetime ISA (LISA). The Origins of the Lifetime ISA A Product of George Osborne’s Final Budget The...

Understanding Retirement Living Standards Determining the ideal income for a comfortable retirement is a common concern. Every year since 2019, the Pension and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA), in collaboration with Loughborough University, publishes crucial...

Inflation & Rising Rates Expose HMRC's Capacity Issues Over the past several years, a consistent strategy employed by successive governments to boost tax revenue has been the freezing of tax allowances and bands. This approach, coupled with rising inflation that...

The Office for National Statistics has taken a fresh look at our mortality. Source: ONS Roughly every two years, stories in the media tell us how many children will live to the age of 100. The latest projections are that 11.5% of boys and 17.9% of girls born in 2023...

What the Chancellor’s Spring Statement Means for Your Future Finances There were no tax increases in the Chancellor’s Spring Statement (upgraded from an initial Spring Forecast), but that might just be pain deferred. Before becoming Chancellor, Rachel Reeves set out a...

UK Inflation Numbers Higher Than Expected 2025’s first set of UK inflation numbers were higher than expected, but more rises are coming. The UK has experienced an inflation rollercoaster since the start of this decade, as have many Western economies. In January 2020,...

Be Financially Ready For Unforeseen Circumstances What if? If something happened to you tomorrow, how easily could your partner access and understand the state of your financial organisation? It’s been five years since the pandemic turned the world upside down. The...

27 Years of Promises: Where Are We Now? The question of how to fund social care is once again a hot topic in British politics. It seems every few years, a new commission or review is launched, raising hopes for a sustainable solution. But how much progress has really...

A recent survey has raised questions about retirement readiness. One of the world’s largest investment managers, BlackRock, recently published its latest review of the UK’s retirement landscape. The work was based on a survey of 1,000 savers in defined contribution...

From new year to year end – Are you keeping a tax planning resolution? The start of the year is the ideal time to focus on year-end tax planning. This is usually driven by the approaching tax year-end (Saturday 5 April 2025) and the Spring Budget. However, this year,...

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has been crunching the numbers on the adequacy of pension contributions and retirement savings. One of the unremarked government successes of the 2010s was the introduction of automatic enrolment of employees into pension...

Are student loans something to avoid? With the 2024/25 academic year on the horizon, student finance is again a hot topic for many parents. How hot differs slightly for the UK’s four nations as each has a subtly different way of funding students and, outside Scotland,...