God rest ye merry IFAs, compliments of the season, ho-ho-ho and other festive greetings says Richard Harvey…
After what has been one of the most tumultuous years in our collective lifetimes, the sentiments of peace on earth and goodwill to all men have never seemed so pertinent.
So allow me to delve into Santa’s sack, and pull out a compendium of Christmas wishes. Namely, that…..
- President Trump delivers on his promise to put the UK at the head of the queue for trade deals (if he isn’t too busy alienating the entire world or poising one of his pudgy little fingers over the nuclear button).
- The unfortunate folk at Bernard Matthews will find their embattled pension fund is able to pay them sufficient to purchase at least one ‘bootiful’ turkey.
- Our Brexit negotiators follow the advice of country singer Kenny Rogers and “know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em”.
- Those crooked IT monkeys in Russia and the Philippines, flooding the internet with phoney investment offers and ransomware, find themselves marooned in the deep midwinter snow, clad only in their undercrackers.
- Carney & Co don’t reduce interest rates even further, exposing savers to Cratchit-esque penury, and
- Currency speculators stop betting against the £. Otherwise, it’s muggy Glencoe rather than icy Courmayeur for the New Year ski brigade.
…..and may have you have a peaceful Christmas and a busy, hopefully prosperous, 2017.
The Daily Mail comes in for a regular and robust kicking from everyone whose political convictions are even slightly left-of-centre, so let’s at least offer congratulations to the paper on the 50th anniversary of its weekly MoneyMail personal finance pages.
And thanks to former MoneyMail editor Tony Hazell for offering readers 50 wizard wheezes on how to save money.
At Harvey House, we already follow some of the more obvious tips, such as selling unwanted household items. Thanks to the unremitting efforts of Lady H, I get all the recommended daily exercise I need slogging down to the Post Office, laden with parcels full of stuff she’s sold on eBay.
I also noted Tony Hazell’s recommendation to check your tax code. Which is fine if, unlike me, you get one a year.
Having recently decided to draw down a modest monthly sum from my SIPP, I received a blizzard of tax code notifications from HMRC, which were about as simple to understand as quantum physics.
Obviously these notifications are computer-generated. Now if those IT monkeys want to find a new system to target…
