Our Free Financial Guides
We offer a wide range of free financial guides on budgeting, saving, investing, and more. Benefit from our experience free of charge.
The Inheritance Tax Guide
Inheritance Tax (‘IHT’) remains the most contentious of taxes – both politically and morally. Where it is payable it often involves substantial sums. In recent years more families than ever before are
getting caught in the IHT net.
People have very different views of IHT and its fairness and how actively it should be avoided. Most people, in our experience, have little appetite for having a large sum deducted from their estate in favour of the government, especially at a time when government finances are in such a dire straight. Why pay tax to a government which has shown little evidence of spending the money wisely?
Guide to the Lifestyle Allowance
The Lifetime Allowance (“LTA”) is a limit on the total value of pension benefits you can build up throughout your lifetime without getting a tax charge. Exceeding this limit will create a tax charge on certain trigger events.
If you are building the value of your pensions, you should be aware of the LTA, how it works, whether or when it may impact you, what happens if it does, and how you can plan to mitigate or work around the allowance.
The Retirement Income Guide
This guide is written to give you a series of thoughts about how to approach planning for your retirement years and how to work out answers to all the questions you will have to address.
Plus we will provide you with six critical steps you should take to ensure your position is as secure as it can be.
The intention is to help you craft the right solutions for your retirement and to support you in getting the best income position you can achieve, through this stage of your life.
Many people, often without realising it, will come into contact with a trust of some sort during their lifetime.
Yet trusts are widely misunderstood and often seen as the preserve of the wealthy. This brochure aims to give a quick overview of how trusts work, what they are most commonly used for and to correct some of the misconceptions held about trusts.
Trusts are becoming a more widespread tool in the search to protect and preserve family assets.
Behavioural Finance Guide
Behavioural finance studies the psychology of financial decisions and is especially important in the investment arena. It explains how investors can sometimes act irrationally or from an emotive viewpoint, with ingrained and unhelpful biases in their approach.
If investors understand these better it is likely they will make better decisions, avoid painful financial errors and reduce their propensity to suffer losses.
Learning about behavioural finance is an important step for investors, even for experienced investors. The most relevant area for investors starts with an appreciation of how biases can often play a big part in investment decisions.
These biases are often hard-wired within us, with valuable benefits in our everyday life.
However, when it comes to money matters, they can have the opposite effect.
Understanding and spotting these biases when they arise can make a positive difference to outcomes.
This guide is intended to tell you more about how a Lasting Power of Attorney works and covers the main points you will want to know.
A Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) is a legal document which allows an individual to appoint a trusted person, for example a friend or a relative, to make decisions on their behalf.
Imagine you cannot make decisions, due to an illness or injury, and your loved ones must pick up the reins.
It is VERY difficult for them to do so without an LPA.
They wouldn’t be able to access your bank account, pay bills, or make key decisions on your behalf. However, with an LPA in place, they would.
Legacy Planning Guide
However, when we look at Legacy Planning this definition is worth widening.
As “One’s Legacy” can be considered much more than just the formal arrangement of a set of instructions in a Legal Document.
For millions of people in the UK, leaving a Legacy will typically include wanting to help the next generations for decades to come, protecting against long-term risks to family and leaving their mark after they have gone.
We need to consider what this means in practical terms and how, years in advance, people can take steps to arrange their affairs to build a legacy which will help their family, community and chosen causes.
