When government ministers start touting solar panels as a substitute for a pension, it really is time to start taking some expert financial advice. And news that one of the predator banks is encouraging (or at least enabling) its customers to gamble away their life savings on the stock market, means the need for impartial [...]
I have for long argued that good financial management concerns more than building wealth – by which I mean those comforting nest eggs that provide us with a good income in our old age and allow us to pass something on to our loved ones when we die – and protecting it. A balance needs [...]
That loud whirring noise you heard coming from the direction of Davos recently was made by the governor of the Bank of England furiously back-pedalling on his “forward guidance” proposal that interest rates should not rise until unemployment fell to seven per cent. Unemployment is now 7.1 per cent and is expected to fall to [...]
Regular readers of this blog will know that The Whitehall Partnership has been waging war against the high fees charged to savers and investors by many finance companies. We regard fees as nothing less than a financial cancer; one that erodes, or even wipes out, returns – an especially damaging factor in a low interest [...]
Anyone with more sense than debt must be praying for a rise in interest rates in 2014. Five years of near-zero returns on deposits have inflicted untold pain on the cautious and prudent – who, it should be remembered, far outnumber the reckless borrowers among us. Many criminals are made to suffer less than savers [...]
Who now trusts the high street banks? 2013 has been another appalling year for these financial juggernauts that crush everything and anyone in the drive for profits – will anything change in 2014? From revelations of market rigging to pressure selling of wholly unsuitable investment and insurance products, the charge sheet keeps on lengthening. From [...]
At the height of the banking crisis of 2008-9, the satirical magazine Private Eye, got to the nub of a phenomenon that seemed to have brought an entire industry to its knees. It printed a spoof “spot the odd man out” quiz that listed the names of the chief executives and chairmen of bust banks [...]
George Osborne’s Autumn Statement provided evidence – if such was needed – of just how dramatically the financial landscape is changing. It also highlighted something that savers and their financial advisers need to act on now; which is that those changes are coming at increasing speed. When he stopped banging the drum for a consumption-led [...]
The need for savers to turn their backs on traditional annuities as a way of financing their retirement is becoming ever more pressing. While many people still think, mistakenly, that an annuity is their only source of a retirement income, the bad news about these largely discredited products keeps coming. In what one newspaper termed [...]
From time to time our national newspapers print stories in their finance pages about what a wonderful investment x or y is, or has been – provided you were smart enough to be in at the start of the boom. Postage stamps and fine wines are periodically held up as examples of what savvy investors [...]
