When going through a divorce, the Court is required to take your pension rights into account, as this is seen as a shared asset. So what options are there when it comes to dividing a pension? Through the Court, a divorcing couple can choose either: Balance the pension rights against another asset, such as the [...]

New Model Adviser Article by William Robins Will Robins continues a series on his experience of going through the life planning process. Just five months after my first meeting, I sat down for the second stage of my life plan with Chris Mellor, director of Buckinghamshire-based Inspired Financial Life Planning, ready to face my mortality. [...]

New Model Adviser Article by William Robins When I sat down with Chris Mellor, director of Inspired Financial Life Planning in Buckinghamshire, I was ‘at right angles’, arms crossed and answering questions as if it was a job interview. After two hours I was a mirror of my interviewer: facing him full on, comfortably reclined and [...]

The Prudential has announced that two in five people are planning their retirement for 2011, even though many have received no advice or have relied solely on non-professional advice.   Two in every five people planning to retire in 2011 will do so having relied on non-professional advice as their main financial information source in [...]

It is a sobering thought that in the 2010/2011 tax year HMRC (formerly the Inland Revenue)  collected in excess of £400 billion in tax from us all.  There are some 60 million residents in the UK so this means that the Government collected circa £7,000 from every man, woman and child including the retired! On [...]

Former economic adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, Derek Scott, has provided an economic outlook for 2011. Derek is now economic adviser to Succession core solution Vestra Wealth LLP. Economic outlook by Derek Scott.   In response to earlier fiscal and monetary stimuli, several developed economies, including the US and Britain recovered strongly in the course [...]

Forthcoming regulation, designed to deliver a more professional Financial Services marketplace to clients, has led us to enter into a strategic partnership with Succession Advisory Services. Whilst we remain totally independent and continue to trade totally autonomously, we benefit from membership of this national partnership of highly specialised and entrepreneurial financial services businesses. Businesses just [...]

It was disappointing to read that Barclays Bank has recently been fined £7.7 million by the Financial Services Authority due to miss-selling of Aviva’s Global Balanced and Global Cautious Income funds to over 12,000 customers between July 2006 and November 2008.  The total monies invested was a significant £692 million and the FSA found significant [...]

Reduce the impact by a Trust in your Will Every year, thousands of people are forced to sell their homes to pay residential or nursing home fees and this can be avoided. If your house is your main asset and your savings and investments come to less than £23,000 you may not have to pay [...]

In May 2008 Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) published a comprehensive guide to “Statutory Maternity Pay – Salary Sacrifice and non-cash benefit on their website (www.hmrc.gov.uk/employers/sml-salary-sacrifice.pdf), a joint effort between HMRC, the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) and the Department for Works and Pensions (DWP), along with the assistance from the [...]