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View Article  Inheritance tax, trusts and the illigitimate son Alistair, that you never knew you had
Mrs Fiddler is a widow with 3 grown up children Tom, Dick & Harriet. She wasn't yet aware of her illigitimate beneficiary Alistair, who would inherit twice as much as her other children. . .   more »
View Article  Flexible Drawdown: The new Rich man's IHT dodge? 50% IT
Consider a wealthy widow(er) pensioner wishing to buy a yacht for £600,000: He could draw 1.2 million pounds from his pension under flexible drawdown and pay £600k tax or he could borrow the money and let his estate pay it off later.   more »
View Article  Flexible Drawdown: The new Rich man's IHT dodge? 40% IT
Consider a wealthy widower pensioner wishing to buy a yacht for £600,000.
He could draw a million pounds from his ...   more »
View Article  ECJ cause insurance & Annuity hikes for girls & boys.

The European Court of Justice place a ban on gender-based insurance pricing means that to save money, women should get ...   more »

View Article  Bank's will-writing delayed charging: Beware!

Banks agree to review their will-writing services amid fears that bereaved families are being overcharged £40m a year. Many banks ...   more »

View Article  Don't take an IHT hit when retiring abroad

 

John Lawson discusses the inheritance tax implications of retiring abroad. ...   more »

View Article  J04 Exam Questions July 2010
RE: J04 Exam Questions July 2010

I was trying to identify the exam questions from yesterday's J04 exam.
You'd think ...   more »
View Article  Further Gateshead IFA, N-Hanced fined by FSA for failing it's clients
Sadly the FSA have had far too much to do in near-by Gateshead lately, with another local IFA N-Hanced fined ...   more »
View Article  Is it wrong to use an Estate Agent's mortgage service
Buying a house can be a complicated process, especially if you’re doing it for the first time, but one thing that’s really annoyed me during the course of buying my property is that I’m really not sure who I can trust.   more »
View Article  Chester-le-street IFA banned by the FSA
Geoffrey David Andrews, trading as Foundations Home Finance, has had his regulatory permissions cancelled by the FSA.
 
Andrews, formerly ...   more »
View Article  Harry Markopolis : How one invester rumbled the fraud of the century
It had been a long day for Harry Markopolos, the man who outed Wall Street titan Bernard Madoff as a crook. The whistleblower whose warnings were ignored for a decade was tired of talking. Markopolos was the first man to alert the SEC to Madoff’s $65 billion (£43 billion) Ponzi scheme, but it repeatedly ignored him.   more »
View Article  Funding your child’s university years
Going to university can cost more than £7,000 a year when you take into account tuition fees, accommodation, food, transport and socialising. IFAonline asks top advisers what parents can do to save enough money to fund their child's further education.   more »
View Article  Third of all client complaints against just three banks
A third - or almost 30,000 - of all consumer complaints referred to the financial ombudsman (FOS) in the second half of last year were against just three high street banks. Figures released today by the FOS show there were 27,137 new grievances against Lloyds TSB, Barclays and Bank of Scotland in the six months to 31 December 2009, with Lloyds the subject of 9,952 complaints.   more »
View Article  Are the FSA good value for money?
" It should be remembered that the Mortgage Code Compliance Board (MCCB) looked after around 10,000 firms and 38,000 registered sales staff at a cost of £4.4 million per annum. This cost is less than the increase in actual costs required by FSA to cover the same, but smaller, sector this year. The FSA has a cost budget this year of £15.6 million for the sector."   more »
View Article  Comparison sites fair poorly in Which survey
We had thought that the Meerkat doll buying public were obsessed with comparison websites as an easy if not thorough ...   more »
View Article  IHT benefits could extend to co-habitués
Inheritance tax benefits enjoyed by married couples could soon be extended to co-habitués under proposals drawn up by the Law Commission.   more »
View Article  A little story in Estate Planning
Dan was a single guy living at home with his father and working in the family business.
 
When he ...   more »
View Article  A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

I'm sure that there are still many people (including some financial advisers) who are struggling to understand how the financial ...   more »

View Article  Banks and regulators to blame for the 'astonishing mess' today
Britain's beleaguered banks are the "authors of their misfortune", with the bankers themselves having made "an astonishing mess" of the ...   more »
View Article  What did the FSA ever do for us then?

Peter McGahan's comical look at how the FSA appear to have let off the banks off the hook time and ...   more »
View Article  RDR 'will drive consumers away'
The Financial Services Authority's Retail Distribution Review (RDR) may serve only to turn people away from financial advice, senior insurance executives say. Two-thirds of attendees at an RDR debate hosted by consultants Watson Wyatt said the Review will either have no impact or a negative effect on consumer uptake of financial services products.   more »
View Article  See our website at www.greengem.co.uk

www.greengem.co.uk

Now complete with Repayment Mortgage calculator and Financial News feed.

 

View Article  The Credit Crunch Timeline

Timeline: Global credit crunch

A year ago, few people had heard of the term credit crunch, but the phrase has ...   more »