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Planning your Retirement Income

Life is completely different when you retire, and you look at every aspect in different ways but one of the hardest things to adapt to is the new level of income, which is likely to be significantly lower than what you may have earned in your working days.

Every year thousands of people hang up their hats, but before you do it can be beneficial to start planning what you’re going to do with that income. Ask yourself whether it will last and whether it will be enough to ensure you do all things you’ve planned to do when you retire.

It can be relatively easy to find yourself with a much lighter account and a pension is what you will completely retire on, while it can be beneficial to not take any risks when investing. The market crash in 2008 punished many retired investors who were taking risky moves in order to earn more income.

UKIP Study – General Election

A study has shown that UKIP will retain around 60% of the people planning to vote for them in this month’s elections for the general election in 2015.

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This is big news and it may be quite worrying for the likes of David Cameron, Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg. Nigel Farage has really picked up a large following since he became leader of the UK Independence Party, and he’s told the world of politics to expect an ‘earthquake’ in the European elections.
He has shown he can debate and many people would agree he came out on top recently in his European election debate with Nick Clegg, and we may soon him take on the likes of Milliband and Cameron.

Wealth Management

Just because you’ve managed to earn a lot of money doesn’t mean that you are equipped well enough to manage all of your money and property. This only because a more strenuous task as you get more money, so having an advisor can be truly helpful. They will be able to give you information you need about investments, property management, and how to find the right person to manage your investment portfolio. As a laymen trying to deal with all of this, you’ll certainly encounter some difficulty. This could be clearly illustrated with the results that the average person will see in their investment portfolio. Typically, an amatuer won’t even get 10% interest on their investments per anum, but a good wealth manager will be able to help get over that. Adjusting to a sudden influx of walth can be difficult, we see this most poignantly with people who’ve won the lottery, with which the typical result is that they lose all of their money within a couple of years. A wealth manager will help you to determine the viability of your options, and give you the right equipment to deal with it all.

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Supply Side Economics

Over the last century, much of the political debate within the western world has been revolving around two opposing theories – or at least seemingly opposing – about the way the economy works. The first, and what much of the “right” side of the political spectrum believes, is in trickle down economics, or supply side economics. Trickle down economics supposes that any wealth generated by and for the upper echolons of our society will eventually trickle down to lesser classes, i.e. rich people pay for things that poor people sell, therefore the money ends up spreading around the whole economic spectrum, and people with the means to generate wealth have the power to continue to do so, either due to tax breaks, or deregulation, or a combination of the two. While there is almost certainly some truth to this, there is a lot of opposition among the “left” to this viewpoint, in that they believe basing the entire economic-political agenda on this principle ignores a lot of distress caused by such an unfettered system.

An arguably opposing theory, seeks to bring us away from supply side economics, by suggesting that from whom the wealth enters the economy is immaterial to the growth we witness as a result. This is the keynesian model, which supposes that, particularly within the short term, increasing economic output through massive investments by the government will increase overall economic output, and essentially restart a stalling economy.

There are examples of both failing, with the disastrous results of deregulating the financial industry, and with work programs run by the governments the world over, which essentially paid people to do things which had no more value than just giving people the money.

The current economic climate within the western world isn’t very condusive to either theory, with the keynesian model exacerbating an already existing problem with government debt, and supply side economic proponents calling for greater and greater deregulation and tax cuts, which could also have disastrous results. Most successful economic turnarounds have used a combination of tax cuts with increases in targetted government investment.

In or Out – The EU Debate

A big part of the recent national discussion is the nature of the EU agreements, and whether they are benefitting the UK, or are a detriment to our way of life and economic growth. We’ve even seen two debates between the two most outspoken parties in this discussion, the Lib Dems, and UKIP, with most of the UK seeming to come down on UKIP’s side of the argument. This is bourne out in the majority of polls taken on the subject, although some of the more in-depth polls seem to indicate something different. While peoples opinions do seem to be strongly against the current EU relationship, they are also in favour of the general idea of what the EU represents, just not when they dictate rules and regulations to our businesses.

The effects of our leaving the EU are still unclear, and that hasn’t really been helped by the debates, as both parties seemed to be cherry picking data to support their own ideas, with the Lib Dems saying that all two million jobs dependent upon the commerce with the EU will be lost, and UKIP saying that we are more than able to go it alone.