SIPPs and NHS Pension

This post builds on our existing NHS Pension series. Throughout the post we’ve put links, where relevant, to the appropriate prior material. We do, however, suggest refreshing your understanding of the NHS Pension prior to reading on. One method of saving money for retirement is to use a Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP). How does a SIPP

Pay rise half-truths

The government this week announced a pay rise for a swathe of public sector employees, among them doctors. If you thought this would bring about high fives, congratulatory back slaps and the medical community celebrating a Covid-induced financial reward you’d be very much mistaken. The announcement contains an (un)healthy dose of spin, papers over cracks

Emergency Fund 2.0

What’s this? A personal finance blog post about Emergency Funds? How unorthodox! What a novelty! Such a trailblazer! Sarcasm aside, we appreciate that the Emergency Fund is a topic done to near-death; it’s perhaps the quintessential personal finance trope. So we’ll try to concisely cut through the usual waffle that you’ve probably read before and

Ethical Investing; Fifty Shades of Green

Key points:• Socially responsible investing (SRI) is increasingly popular and prominent.• Investing using an SRI strategy may not compromise risk-adjusted returns. • Care must be taken to examine the credentials of SRI funds, rather than taking the label at face value. Ethical investing is just one of the many monikers of an investment strategy that

Positives and Negatives

Life is full of opposing forces that might be balanced, or even harmonised. Good and bad. High and low. Yin and yang. Pleasure and pain. Credit and debt. Overt focus on the negatives can lead to a spiralling nihilism, whereas blissful ignorance of them might promote an unrealistic mania. We’ve reflected on a few of

Chasing Inflation

As many readers will already know, inflation is “the change in prices for goods and services over time” or “a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money” 1,2. As often with dictionary definitions, the words don’t necessarily convey the true meaning of the term. So we’ll borrow our own example:

Johari, Rumsfeld and overpaying mortgages

There’s a common question we come across again, and again, and again. You’ve probably seen it before, or at least a variation of it. It goes like this: “I have extra money left at the end of the month, should I overpay my mortgage or…” There are many options for the second part of the

The NHS Pension: Allowances

This post builds on our existing NHS Pension series. Throughout the post we’ve put links, where relevant, to the appropriate prior material. We do, however, suggest refreshing your understanding of the NHS Pension prior to reading on. The term allowance reminds me of pocket money, that highly prized one or two pound coin slipped to

To me, to you

The term savings rate brings about agreement and argument in equal vigour. A higher savings rate is almost universally deemed to be a good thing, although there’s likely to be a sweet spot between putting aside a suitable quantity of money and sacrificing too much quality of life. What really brings about disagreement, however, is

A Different Debt to Pay

Eradication of existing ‘bad’ debt is one of the pillars of living in a financially stable fashion. This is surely not news to many of you. In addition to loans, credit cards or mortgages, there’s another debt that most of us owe: sleep debt. Again, it’s probably not an earth-shattering revelation that sleep is vitally