We saw the collapse of two major banks in the US with Silicon Valley Bank in California and Signature Bank in New York failing. In Europe, Credit Suisse had to borrow up to $54 billion from the Swiss central bank. What happened and should we be worried that there will be another collapse of the […]
A friend of mine is eligible to join their new employer’s group pension scheme and asked me to advise them on it. Of course I obliged, but isn’t there a scheme broker to go through the scheme with them? No, they were sent an email with the form, asked to fill it out and return […]
Warren Buffett issued his 2022 shareholder letter on 25 February. Over the last number of years, his letters has been getting shorter and this is the shortest one yet. But there are still nuggets of advice to gleam from it to help us be better investors. Saving is a habit “A common belief is that […]
In the tv show Suits, Michael gets a job as an associate in top law firm Pearson Hardman, despite not having a law degree. They get several series out of this before he and the firm gets exposed and the firm is almost ruined. In professions like the law or accounting, you have to be […]
Budget 2023 made some interesting changes to pension funding. Under traditional company pensions, a company can make generous contributions but there was a formula used in calculating how much can be made each year which the company could claim tax relief against. This formula included your age, salary, current pension values and a computation factor […]
There were a couple of really good articles last week about the quick collapse of wealth. The first one in the Financial Times was about the final hours of FTX. It was a fascinating insight into the collapse of a company once worth $40 billion. Its founder Sam Bankman-Fried had a personal wealth of $20 […]
We’ve all had fantasised about what we would do if we won the Euro millions and had more money than we could think of. Who we would buy houses for, who we would give a few quid to? What car would you buy? Where would you go on holidays? Would we give up work, reduce […]
This week we have a guest blog from ChatGPT. If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT yet, it is an artificial intelligence tool designed by OpenAI. I typed in “write a 500 word essay on which is a better investment strategy, the S&P 500 or the MSCI World Index”. Within seconds, it started to type out […]
Brooklyn Beckham, son of David and Victoria Beckham, has had many careers. One was as a photographer, and he published a book of his work called What I see. This included the silhouette of an elephant where he took the photo facing the sun. The photograph had the caption “elephants in Kenya, so hard to […]
We constantly read about overnight success stories. Young people who come from nowhere to own multi billion dollar businesses. At the same time, young people are looking at their starting salary out of college and wondering where they got it all wrong. How come they aren’t earning the big bucks? It’s all a myth. The […]