A new report has shown conflicting ideas about retirement.* The report included two questions: Question 1: At what age would you like to retire? Question 2: At what age do you think you will be able to retire? If your answers to those two questions are different, then you are not alone. The report found that the average answer to question 1 was 62.3 years old, while for question 2 it was 67.0, a gap of nearly half a decade. The difference was just 0.9 years for baby boomers –

Nine months into 2025, investment performance may not be what you expect. Source: Investing.com * The daily blog from Financial Times, FT Alphaville, runs a competition every Friday for a trivial prize, such as a T-shirt. The quiz typically involves a trio of graphs with the same question applied to each one: what is being plotted? The answers are usually esoteric: two recent examples were an Argentinian government bond and two classes of debt from First Brands, a US car part

HMRC’s latest statistics show a jump in unclaimed Child Trust Funds (CTFs) to over £1,500,000,000.* CTFs had only a brief existence. They were launched in January 2005 by the previous Labour government and survived for just six years, before being culled by the Conservative /LibDem coalition government in 2011, shortly after it came to power.** While the main reason for their demise was financial, it was also a fact that CTFs failed to capture the public imagination. Over a q

The ingredients to determine next April’s increase in the State pension are now clear and suggest a problem deferred until the 2026 Budget. Source: DWP, HMRC The basis for increases to the old and new State pension is the ‘triple lock’, which sets the change in April to be the greater of: Earnings growth for the period May to July in the previous year, Consumer Price Index inflation to September of the previous year, or 2.5%. The earnings growth figure, 4.7%, was published in

A new survey has revealed a high level of public unawareness of impending pension changes and the need to plan. While there is plenty of media attention on what surprises might emerge in the November Budget, new research has suggested that many people are unaware of pensions reforms and changes to tax already in train. A survey of 1,500 people aged 45 and over undertaken for a UK wealth manager revealed: More than half of respondents were “not at all aware” of upcoming policy

As the Autumn Budget approaches, government bonds are coming back into the spotlight. In what can seem like an effort to confuse, government bonds are often referred to as gilts. There are two good reasons for the name: In the distant era of paper certificates, government bonds were on gilt-edged paper. There has never been an instance when the UK government has failed to make the payment due. Gilts are effectively IOUs issued by the government to finance the gap between its