With property prices on the rise, it is very easy for someone who inherits the family home to be faced with a Capital Acquisition Tax bill for inheriting the family home. The threshold for inheritance from parent to child is €335,000 and just €32,500 from another relative. If the family home was valued at €500,000, […]
Warren Buffett published his shareholder letter for 2021 back in February. As we have seen over the last few years, his letter has gotten shorter with less advice on investing and more focus on numbers and facts. There are still some nuggets of advice to take away. 3 ways to increase the value of your […]
One of the features of the auto enrollment pension scheme is that members will not get tax relief on their contributions. Instead, the State will make a top-up contribution to your pension pot and your own contributions will be deducted from your net salary (the payment amount will be calculated from gross salary). The government […]
Minister for Social Protection, Heather Humphreys, published the framework for the pension auto enrollment scheme. This is something that has been talked about since 2007, so it is good to see things moving forward and it looks like it is actually going to happen. We have written about this before, so I am not going […]
2022 has been an awful year so far for investors. Both equities and bonds are down, there is no return on deposits and inflation is only getting higher. Yet investors are not panicking as before. What has changed? Experience It is now easier than ever for people to invest money. More people invest than in […]
Russia produces about 10% of the world’s oil. They are also the world’s second biggest producer of gas and supply and they produce 30% of Europe’s gas. One of the economic consequences of Russia invading Ukraine is a sharp increases in the price of energy (this is nothing compared to what the Ukrainian people have […]
Liverpool Football Club won the League Cup (I can’t keep up with the change of sponsors, so I just call it the league cup, much to my son’s amusement) last week. It was an entertaining 0-0 draw with both sides having goals disallowed for marginal VAR decisions. Liverpool won the penalty shoot-out 11-10. Liverpool are […]
Structured products have been around for a long time. We have always viewed them to be a poor quality products for our clients so they are not something that we use. But people do use them, otherwise they wouldn’t have survived as long as they have. They have always been complex products which traditionally used […]
I did the following recently: Profit off the table We sold some money in an investment account that we have. With investment returns doing so well, we decided to take some profit off the table and pay down some of our mortgage. Some money was taken out in December and another amount in early January. […]
As a financial advisor, we always talk to clients about the relationship between risk and return. I’ve even written about it and again and again. When you invest in funds, you don’t see the rise and fall of individual stocks and it can be of little interest. That’s because investing should be boring. Now you […]