Category archives: Savings & Investments

Have you ever made an irrational or impulsive purchase you’ve later regretted? We all make decisions based on our emotions or personal biases, but when it comes to investing, such mistakes can be very costly.  What is behavioural investment?  Behavioural investment is an approach that acknowledges how our emotions and our biases can sometimes make […]

Since being launched on 6 April 1999 as successor to PEPs and TESSAs, the Individual Savings Account (ISA) has become an integral part of the UK savings and investment landscape.  Worth celebrating  By any measure, the humble ISA has been a huge success. The latest HMRC figures show that more than 22 million UK adults […]

Does your investment portfolio suffer from too much ‘home bias’? It’s natural for investors to stay close to home when thinking about investing, contemplating well-known UK companies or UK-focused funds rather than looking further afield. But if your portfolio becomes too heavily concentrated in the UK, you risk missing out on valuable diversification benefits and […]

Dividend investors have been rewarded so far in 2024, with payouts from UK shares rising by 4.9% in the first three months of the year compared with the same period in 20231.  The data tracks dividend payouts from 900 UK companies and comes as good news for income seekers. Computershare upgraded their headline forecast from […]

Recently published research suggests the long-heralded ‘great wealth transfer’ is now firmly underway, which inevitably heightens the need for carefully considered intergenerational financial planning as assets continue to flow down the generations.  The great transfer  Dubbed by analysts the ‘great wealth transfer,’ the next two decades are set to witness the largest ever intergenerational transfer […]

We all want a good start in life for the children in our family. After providing for the immediate needs of younger children, thoughts turn towards the future and consideration of longer-term goals. You may want to consider investing for your child’s future to potentially build something significant which they can call on in later […]

Nearly half (48%) of adults aged 18 to 40 don’t have life insurance1. This puts many in a precarious position, as the unfortunate reality is that the cost of dying is high.  Research has found that a premature death can cost surviving family members an average of £195,475 over the course of ten years2. These […]

Increased investor confidence in equity funds over the last few months has been evidenced by a leading Index1, with UK investors at their most bullish in almost three years.  Equity fund inflows reached £2.01bn in January, one of the top ten months on record and the highest since April 2021. In addition, the January Index […]

If elections have consequences, as Barack Obama said, then 2024 looks like being a highly consequential year. Some 64 countries are due to hold elections this year (including the US, India, Brazil, Russia and very probably the UK), representing over half of the global population and, in economic terms, half of the world’s gross domestic […]