Do you struggle to motivate yourself when it comes to certain financial-related tasks? If you do, you certainly aren’t alone. More people than you probably think, while they appreciate how important such tasks are, can be reluctant to knuckle down and get them done. There’s no one reason for this, and no simple solution to curing any procrastination blues you may be struggling with. Here’s what I think are the main reasons for inhibition, why a desire for perfection could be acting as a block, and some simple steps to overcome any reluctance you have to get financial tasks done. Making financial decisions can be intimidating Encouraging you to make important decisions about your finances (and, ultimately, your life) is... Read More

Financial planning has made significant strides over the past few decades giving you, as an investor today, advantages that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. Some of the advances that have now become commonplace include: Access to online financial advice Low-cost investment administration options Digital signature capabilities Easy account aggregation software. Those, along with global equity portfolios with no upfront fees, are all technological advancements that have streamlined even the most complex of your financial tasks, allowing for more efficient personal financial management. Taken together, they mean that it’s easier than ever for you to implement your financial strategy in a sensible and cost-efficient manner. The growing tangle of financial administration Despite these advances, it’s likely that you are... Read More

Our daily lives revolve around making decisions, from what you have for breakfast in the morning to the time you decide to go to bed at night. But in a wider context, many of the bigger and more detailed decisions you have to make can have a long-lasting effect on your life. Important choices such as what you study at university, who you choose as your life partner, and where you decide to live can all have an effect on you that will reverberate for many years into the future. Because of the understandable high stakes involved in a lot of your decision-making, it’s important to give some thought to how you make decisions, and how you can give yourself... Read More

The human brain is powerful but subject to limitations. For this reason, we have evolved to have a collection of cognitive biases. These are systematic errors in thinking that occur when you process and interpret information around you, and it can affect the decisions and judgments that you make. One of these biases is overconfidence. This is the tendency to be more confident in your own abilities than is objectively reasonable. The best-known examples of this are the multiple studies in which a majority of respondents believe themselves to be above-average drivers. Financial planning requires several assumptions to be made before any useful projections and analysis can be done, and these inform the decisions that could affect you for decades... Read More

2024 has been called “the year of elections” with an estimated 2 billion people around the world heading to the polls. Voters in the UK will have their say on 4 July. Now that each of the main parties has published their manifestos, here’s what the 2024 general election could mean for your finances. Conservatives – more National Insurance cuts and the “triple lock plus” Having already reduced National Insurance (NI) rates twice in 2024, the Conservatives have made further cuts to NI one of their flagship policies at this election. They propose to: Take another 2p off employee NI by April 2027, reducing the rate from 12% at the start of 2024 to 6%. They say this represents a... Read More