For as long as most of us have been paying into a pension, there has been one quietly brilliant fact sitting underneath the whole system: whatever was left in your pot when you died did not count as part of your estate. No inheritance tax. It sat there, untouched by the taxman, as if it…
The hardest part of retirement investing is not the maths. It is watching your pension pot fall by twenty five percent while you are relying on it to fund your life, and feeling, quite viscerally, that something must be done about it right now. This feeling is not irrational. It is exactly the response that…
If you have already read the guide to ethical investing in a UK ISA, you have done something most people never get round to. You have looked at what your ISA actually holds, and made a considered choice about it. Well done. Now here is the uncomfortable follow-up question. What is your pension invested in?…
Sustainable investing has become one of the most discussed and least understood ideas in personal finance over the past decade. I’ve seen it evolve and change throughout the latter years of my time in the industry. The terminology shifts every few years. The marketing has run ahead of the substance. The funds available are dramatically…
The short answer to “when can I retire” depends on three numbers: how much you have, how much you need to live on each year, and when your other income sources arrive. I get asked this a lot. It is not a question of age. It is a question of arithmetic. For most UK adults,…
There is a small inconvenience in personal finance that almost no one talks about honestly. The thing that makes the biggest difference to whether you end up with money, more than your salary, more than your fund choice, more than your tax wrapper, is something you cannot buy, cannot accelerate, and cannot get back once…
The rise of what became known as Ethical Investing was a real feature of the latter years of my career. In the early years folk weren’t sure how important it was going to be, nor was there any early governance on what Ethical Investing actually comprised. What make one product or service ethical and another…
Of all the FIRE variants, the one most likely to actually work for ordinary UK earners is also the least talked about. Full FIRE (saving aggressively until you can stop working entirely) requires very high savings rates that most people genuinely can’t sustain over a decade or more. The maths is impressive but the lifestyle…
When someone is considering ethical investing for the first time, the question they ask first (or worry about silently) is almost always the same: do ethical funds underperform? It’s a fair question, and one the ethical investing industry has historically been bad at answering directly. The marketing tends toward “you don’t have to sacrifice returns…
There’s an investing concept that gets discussed often but explained badly. The financial industry treats it as a sophisticated technique requiring careful judgment and ideally professional help. The honest truth is that rebalancing your portfolio is one of the simpler maintenance jobs in long-term investing, and most ordinary investors either don’t need to do it…
