Of all the recent blogs, this one you need to read. All the trusts share prices have fallen in recent weeks due to the Swiss ripping up of the banking rule books, but the reserves of those trusts have not moved a jot – that simply means that each £1 of income they pay is now cheaper to buy than before the crisis. Cheaper to buy means a higher income yield, the maths is quite simple. Remember that…

Blimey, it’s enough to keep you awake at night, so much going on it’s quite wise to stand at the side and watch the world go past – after all, you saw all this in the 70’s, 80’s and then the 00’s (the noughties, I believe). In the blog today I have just outlined a list of ten key items that caught our financial eye this week.

The largest survey of recent retirees in the US found the biggest source of anxiety that retirees suffered from was a lack of routine. We can tell when retirees are bored, they spend too much time fiddling with the detail of their money, accounts, investments, and sometimes ex-City workers keep…

In January this year, Kseniia, our Ukrainian analyst, ran comparisons over the last ten calendar years of the Vanguard FTSE tracker (cost 0.09% pa) versus a unit trust JO Hambro UK Equity (cost 0.67% pa) versus the Merchants Trust (cost 0.61%). Kseniia ran two scenarios, both covering 2013 to 2022…

Being independent, we are agnostic in our choice of assets, products, managers, platforms, strategies – we have the luxury of being able whatever we want in creating client portfolios. We live and die by the sword though – if the income a client needs isn’t delivered then the relationship is very short lived, so our job is finding the optimal solution to meet your specific needs.

Spending money – your retirement money – starts off being a science and then moves to the emotional. How people invest money is hidden, not visible, but how it is spent is the opposite and that may be more insightful. Money is a utility, it’s for a purpose; if it is…

If you’re nearing or at retirement, you should be aware of two new taxes that were introduced alongside Pension Freedoms back in 2015. And the two things your retirement depends on.

I noted on a DIY investor site this week that they were running a story on people who run their lives – top to bottom – on being able to retire when they reach 40. I wonder if they have understood what retirement really is? It's not just the length of retirement that’s important, it’s also the breadth…

This week David Stevenson wrote about us in Citywire, asking why don’t more people realise trusts are great pension income providers if you care more about steady income than steady capital growth.

Working with people like you all day, every day, we run several continual, repetitive conversations so I’ve outlined for you here the three dilemmas every client gets caught with, and why the questions are non-binary. There’s a point to noodles, but more importantly we outline for you the three main ways of drawing income from your pension.

This time I cover two aspects of retirement for you – one is what to do with the free time and your Third Age, the other is how to pay for it.

First a quick look at the fun part of retiring, the whole point – stepping away from the desk brings 24/7 freedom so what’s your plan? Here’s what Steve & Judy from the BBC did in the mid-50’s as a change of tack (pun intended) and plan for filling retirement years.

Today we’ll have a quick look at some items we have come across recently – we’ll show you what Russian bots on the web actually look like and the simple error Norway has made on its wealth tax.

This week we have been running annual updates and valuations for all our clients – the updates include the month by month record of the actual income, and these annual tables are stacked with the prior years to provide clients with the reassurance of just how reliable the income is in reality. You can’t pay bills with optimistic asset allocation.

Now here’s a double edged blessing; many moons ago I was at a drinks party hosted by my father and I joined his group swapping tails. He remarked to the eldest of the group that an upside of being older was that he no longer had school costs to pay, to which the reply was ‘Who do you think pays the grandchildren’s school fees?’ Quite…

Do you read the FT? Most readers here will say ‘no’, and that’s as it should be, we’ll show you why. Anxiety free investing? There’s a very real technique in doing this, backed up by a Nobel Prize, so I outline for you how that’s done, and what you definitely should not be doing.

An astute investor I know of in the US, Morgan Housel, is also a very, very accomplished communicator who is effective at distilling practices and experience into simple summaries. The simple litmus test of financial decisions he believes is the question ‘Does this help me sleep at night?’ What he is saying is…

Following on from last week’s note, maybe its only stuffy baby boomers who have noted the irony in the FTX crypto investors rushing to the exit to sell their crypto holdings for cash. Next up on the list of items proving cashflow is king, is Mike Ashley – he’s in the process of…

As people we know about ‘the law of unintended consequences’, and that rule applies throughout the arithmetic of investment. Some is unintended, some consequences are designed, some are simply natural. Interest rate rises have a…

Like borrowing money for a car or a house, government money also needs to be paid back, and that job belongs to Jeremy Hunt. His predecessor said he planned to ignore paying back what we owe so the lenders had him and his boss evicted. It’s interesting to note that…