The world of personal finance is a minefield. If you don’t work in this area or take lots of time to figure out how it works, it can be very confusing and off putting. One of those areas is that of allocation rates. That is, of the money you contribute, how much of that is […]
The days of working in the same company for 40 years and collecting your pension at the end is gone. People are moving around jobs more and more these days…and accumulating pensions funds along the way. Is it a good idea to keep them all together, transferring benefits into your new scheme or should you […]
I wrote a few weeks ago about the probable end of owning a property through your pension under the IORPS II legislation that is due to be enacted early this year. For those who still want to use their pension to fund a property, there is a solution…the return of the pension backed mortgage! What […]
New legislation called IORPS II (Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision) Directive was supposed to become law on 13 January 2019. This hasn’t happened yet, but the Department of Employment and Social Protection, along with The Pensions Authority are working on it and it is expected to become law in the first quarter of this year. […]
Not everyone matures their pension and retires. This is especially true for company directors. In many instances, they will mature their pension funds and carry on working. They may have needed to access the tax free lump sum early to fund their business or pay off their mortgage. But that does not mean the end […]
When PRSAs were created, the legislation around them through up some little quirks that practioners discovered when they got into the weeds and read through the actual legislation. One of those quirks lead to the creation of the Vested PRSA. That is, at retirement age, you can take 25% as a tax free lump sum […]
PRSA’s were created under legislation in 2002. They were marketed as the flexible, transferable pension plan. But the take up of them was very low as people stayed away from them. They are a lot more popular now with a lot of people making inquiries about setting up a PRSA. A lot of the time, […]
I work with a number of ambitious career people in their 20’s. They are in well paying jobs and have lots of surplus income. They want to build wealth over time so instead of spending all this extra money on designer clothes or gadgets, they want it to work for them. They are happy to […]
The State pension increased in the last Budget by €5 a week, which will bring it up to €248.30 a week or €12,911.60 a year. If you were to buy a this pension yourself from an insurance company, it would cost you €325,000. That’s a lot of money to accumulate yourself from a private pension. […]
At Bluewater, we have a clearly defined investment philosophy. One of our key investment principles is diversification. As property mania has taken hold in Ireland again, investors are losing their investment discipline and taking more investment risk by rejecting diversification in favour of concentration and debt. What is diversification? Taken from our investment philosophy: Diversification […]