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Tax avoidance is not illegal. Some commentators may regard it as immoral, but using an artificial scheme that is fully disclosed to HMRC, to reduce one’s tax bill, is not against the law. If the tax scheme fails to achieve the promised tax savings, the scheme users will have to pay the tax avoided plus

Britain’s over-55s are cashing in on the improving economy with rising incomes leading to more than £150 extra in their pockets a month compared to the same time last year, Aviva’s latest Real Retirement Report shows. Findings show savings pots have increased too, but the level of monthly expenditure has risen with the cost of

As the weather turns and we move toward the Summer months, it’s natural for all of us to look forward to forthcoming holidays and some time away somewhere nice! Foreign finance is a notoriously troublesome area, with poor exchange rates on overseas credit card transactions being just one of several fairly recent high profile examples

Estates liable for Inheritance Tax in the UK in 2010-2011 faced a bill of nearly £166,000 on average, according to new analysis of HMRC data by Prudential. The study, based on the latest publicly available regional data on tax receipts, shows that in the 2010-2011 tax year, inheritance tax was paid on around 15,600 estates

Some months we sit down to write this report and think to ourselves, ‘Not much happened really…’ And then you get a month like the one that’s just finished where pretty much everything happened! Elections were held across Europe – and the big story was the rise and rise of the extremist parties, with UKIP

The month got off to a gloomy start, especially if you are a Guardian reader. Five signs the global recovery may be an illusion was the headline on one of its main analysis articles, which pointed out that the world of 2014 was not very dissimilar to the world of 2004 – when (we now

Company directors and owners of SMEs make plans and do forecasts all the time. Cash flow forecasts, SWOT analyses, plans for renewals and refurbishment; there’s hardly a day when they’re not eyeball to eyeball with a spreadsheet. So why do so many of them fail to plan their own retirements properly? In our experience company

The average UK household overall is 26 days from the breadline, but this reduces to just 11 days for those of working age (18-64 years old). People estimate their savings will last them 72 days – almost three times the actual deadline to exhausting reserve funds. Wales and the North East have the shortest deadlines

If you are lucky enough to have a pension pot or a pension plan that works out your savings as being worth more than £1.5 million, then when you take your benefits, it is likely that you will have to pay a lifetime allowance tax charge on the excess. The existing fixed Lifetime Allowance (LTA)