I wrote earlier this week that it seemed to me to be a good idea to concentrate on building up Isa savings over pension savings. One of the reasons I often give for this view …
Why Isas are safer from the government than pensions
Category: Blog
The dangers of pension complacency
I wrote here this week that one of my worries about the new auto-enrolment pension scheme was that it would breed complacency among savers. After all, if the government mandates that you must save a …
Stop throwing money at people’s ludicrous pet charity projects
It is hard to keep up with the endless idiocy pouring out of party conference season. But one idea that hasn’t had much attention yet comes from the sometimes perfectly sensible Justine Greening. She has …
The madness of Miliband’s energy price cap
Until Ed Miliband announced that the UK has such expensive energy that he must do something about it, I hadn’t actually noticed that we have some of the cheapest gas and electricity prices in Europe. …
A solution for cash-poor pensioners: a state-run equity-release scheme
If you think about the problem inherent in the UK’s retired population having too much property and not enough pension, there is an obvious solution: equity release. People get old and they run out of …
Population growth? It’s nothing to worry about
An interview with Sir David Attenborough in the Telegraph. He is very worried about the world’s growing population. He is convinced that “we are heading for disaster unless we do something”. If we don’t cut …
Good news for those with a thirst for knowledge
“Topple these barriers to our best universities” read a headline in the Observer last month. The piece then went on to bemoan the fact that the opportunities to be gained from higher education “remain heavily …
The greatest pension raiders of all: governments
We’ve written here several times about the dangers to your pensions from a deeply indebted government (see the post directly below, for starters). We have also said that this isn’t just about allowances being reduced …
Act now on your pension pot – before the government does
We’ve written before about the dangers inherent in saving too much into a pension. Our government (like all governments in the West) needs more money, and pensions are pretty easy targets. There’s a lot of …
What should we do about Britain’s low wages?
‘In search of growth without inflation’. That’s the title of an old Statist article from 1967 I have sitting on my desk. Its author was worried: the UK had a little deflation going on; everyone …