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Coalition – come clean on your plan for our pension.
Image via Wikipedia The Government has plans to change our pensions, not just what we receive but when we receive it. The main thrust of its latest Green Paper is that the State Retirement Age is...
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Top News! – Scrap national insurance on your pension payments!
saving and spending (Photo credit: 401K) There’s plenty reasons to feel depressed if you run a pension scheme for your staff. Investment returns – depressed, annuity rates – depressed, you and your...
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Offshore payroll companies – a (pensions) scandal in the making?
Last night’s documentary on @bbc5live has unearthed a potential pensions scandal that should have the Pension Regulator and the DWP springing to action. The problem is this. The Agencies that have...
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Hats off to Steve Webb for our new pensions system!
It’s good to see the publication of the DWP’s white paper Security in Retirement – towards a new pension system. It announces an initiative first promoted by Frank Field in the late 1990s but thought...
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Seven things to know about the new state pension!
Portrait photo of Barbara Castle (Photo credit: Wikipedia) These charts have been kindly donated by Citywire and their New Model Adviser team (to whom we should be very grateful). Each one of...
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Beeb forces closure of offshore payroll loophole
Last November I wrote three articles about ISS and other offshore payroll companies. You can read them by pressing these three links. I argued that agency workers were being tricked out of penssion...
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The Budget – Becalmed in the middle of the lost decade!
Comment of the day.. “We can drink our way out of trouble 1p at a time” The big policy news for those in pensions is the bringing forward of the changes to the Basic State Pension which weren’t in the...
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The year pensions became real again
Pensions – real money Pension money is real money. It belongs to real people and is used to pay real bills, putting fuel into cars, buying flowers in supermarkets and paying for tickets to watch...
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Is auto-enrolment any more than a tax?
Speaking in Birmingham last week, former pension minister Steve Webb, commented on how hard it will be to raise the bar on employer auto-enrolment contributions from the current 1% of band earnings to...
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A tax on pensions, no one saw coming.
The single state pension , coming to a pensioner near you , from April 2016 is supposed to be simple. It will operate under the same rules for everyone. But that doesn’t mean that everyone will get...
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Pension’s pain is payroll’s gain!
The 25th November is likely to be another red letter day for pensions. The consultation on the way tax relief is paid to those contributing to pensions ended on September 30th and we understand that...
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What is salary sacrifice and why’s it under threat?
If you read Jo Cumbo’s piece on possible changes to pensions tax relief in the FT yesterday, you’ll have seen references to the abolition of pension salary sacrifice. Pension Salary Sacrifice is quite...
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What does the national living wage mean to pensions?
It’s here, it’s being earned and it matters! The National Living Wage (let’s call it NLW to spare space) is going to be paid to those over 25 and means a 50p an hour pay rise and It is expected to...
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Respect for the self-employed
It’s a truth as old as the hills that there are two types of self-employed. Those who choose to be and those who have no choice. Most people who read this blog have more experience with the...
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Where does all our money go?
Two of the big three revenue sources are income tax and national insurance, they’re the ones who hurt the well off. The third biggie -VAT is the one that hurts the poorest. Poor people pay VAT at the...
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A new pension deal for the self employed
In April 2015, the Government announced it intended to abolish class 2 National Insurance Contributions and replace them with a new system for the payment of Class 4 NICS. On 5th December they...
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Time to dig this Government out of its hole?
Tax, national insurance and pensions policy should be put in a vault marked “toxic” and should be handled with extreme caution. This morning I have three toxic issues to prove my point. The fiasco of...
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Giving the self-employed their “pensions due”.
The budget announcement of a phased 2% increase in Class 4 National Insurance Contributions (NIC)s was generally considered bad politics but could it be good policy? In pension circles, any changes to...
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Nice perk if you can get it! Pension Exclusion in the UK.
Nice perk if you can get it! When Guy Opperman became Pensions Minister , he close to have the words ” financial inclusion” inserted into his title, now is the time for him to prove his title’s worth....
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“Mind the width – improve the quality” #Pensions must “include” properly!
When Guy Opperman became Pensions Minister , he had” financial inclusion” inserted into his title; now comes his challenge. According to Government statistics, there are 675,000 qualifying workers in...
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