General Financial Planning | Ross Naylor

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Five ways to invest a bonus

When anticipating an annual bonus, it is natural to envision all the things you want to purchase or start planning a lavish vacation. However, it is worth taking the time to step back and contemplate how you intend to use such a windfall before it lands in your bank account. Consider how your bonus can best serve you and your objectives in both the short and long term, regardless of the amount you earned.

Expat financial advice: Why should I have a 6 month emergency fund?

Whenever I speak to clients about investing, I always talk about having an emergency fund equivalent to 6 months of expenses first. Sometimes life can present you with a situation where you need quick access to money and without a financial safety net it can threaten your financial well-being and cause a great deal of stress.

How to find a lost pension

It has been estimated that there could be about 2.8 million lost or forgotten pension pots in the UK, worth an average of £9,500 each. I.e. over £26.6 billion in total. This is hardly surprising. The days of working for one employer for 40 years and then retiring with a gold carriage clock are over. Research suggests that average workers will now have 11 different jobs during their life. As people move from job to job more and more frequently,…

8 cyber security tips to safeguard your retirement plans from scammers

This month (October) is cyber security awareness month. What has cyber security got to do with your retirement you may ask? Everything, is the answer. Online scams are everywhere. I read about them all the time. You don’t want your well-thought-out retirement plan being torpedoed due to a lack of online hygiene. With that in mind, here are 8 tips for ensuring that you stay safe from scammers.

Expat Finance 101: 10 Reasons You Should Have a Will

You have probably been told on numerous occasions that you should have a Will. Indeed, doing so may have been on your mental to-do list for months or years. However, you haven’t yet gotten around to it. This may just be due to the hustle and bustle of day-to-day expat life. It may be that you aren’t really sure how to get started. Nonetheless, making a Will is one of the most important things we can do.

Expat Financial Advice: How do I manage currency risk?

When we live back in our home country, managing currencies is all pretty straightforward. We are paid in our home currency, we pay your bills in our home currency, and most of our investments are likely in our home currency. In this case, we generally have very little currency risk. The problem we have as expats, however, is that we have too many choices.

Are we heading for a recession?

A recession is coming. There is a 100% chance that there will be a recession in the future. Unfortunately, there is almost a 0% chance that anyone can accurately tell you when it’s going to start (or end). Unlike in King Belshazzar’s feast, the economy doesn’t write on walls.

A deeper look at inflation

With UK inflation at 5.5%*, quite simply, if you are saving for retirement your money is going to have to work harder to keep its value Let’s say you were planning to retire on savings of £500,000. If prices go up by 10% before you retire, you’ll need to save an additional £50,000 to have the same retirement you had planned for. This means that either you will have to save more or you will need to delay your retirement.

Financial planning for expat women

Did you know that women typically live longer than men? This fact applies irrespective of nationality. In the UK, the difference in life expectancy is almost 4 years. Women also tend to have much shorter working tenures than men, which means less time to build up retirement funds.

Getting remarried? Add these 6 financial tasks to your to-do list

The number of remarriages in England and Wales increased by 418% in the half-century between 1969 and 2019. The data also shows that second marriages are usually more likely to be successful than first marriages. Maybe remarriages aren’t simply the triumph of hope over experience after all. However, there is still plenty of potential for conflict over financial matters, especially where multiple sets of children are involved.

What are my life insurance options when living abroad?

As an expat, there are a number of reasons why you may be looking for life insurance. It could be that your previous policy has come to the end of it’s term. Or it may be that you have found out that your old policy does not cover you now that you are living overseas. You may have had a “life event”, e.g. marriage or birth of a child. Or you may be looking to use it as a way…

What is the difference between residence and domicile?

When living overseas, understanding the difference between domicile and residence is critically important. Unfortunately, the two are often confused. The resulting tax implications can be significant and wide-ranging.

A New Year Financial Check-Up

The start of a New Year is always a good time to review one’s finances. In fact, with 2021 behind us and the pandemic still rumbling on, a financial check-up may be more important than ever this year. With that in mind, here are some ways to make sure that your financial situation is on the right track.

Some thoughts for the festive period

With Christmas a few days away and an onslaught of New Year resolutions not far behind, this super article from Morgan Housel is a reminder that the relentless pursuit of more often leads to just more disappointment.

Quilter International now part of the Utmost Group

Earlier this week, Utmost Group acquired Quilter International from Quilter plc. Quilter International will become a part of Utmost International, their international life assurance and investment business. The price tag is £483 million. Following on from the acquisition, the combined group will manage £54 billion for 220,000 clients.

Guide to CGT rules for UK expat property owners

The rule used to be that as long as an expat had been non-UK resident for five consecutive tax years, then they would not be taxed on any gains made when they sold UK property. However, as of 6th April 2015, that ceased to be the case. Now, if you are an expat who owns UK property, you will potentially need to pay Capital Gains Tax (CGT). It doesn’t matter how long you have lived outside the UK or even…

How can marriage or divorce affect your Will?

As the old saying goes, the only sure thing in life is death and taxes. Having a Will in place can at least help mitigate the emotional stress of the former. However, it is crucial that any Will is kept up to date with changing personal circumstances. In this post, we will look at the impact of marriage and divorce on an existing Will.

How to prepare an in case of death folder

Have you ever thought about how you would like your affairs to be left in the event of your sudden death? Apologies for such a dramatic lead-in, however when one of my clients passed away suddenly (he was the same age as me), it got me thinking about how I can help others make sure that their financial affairs are better organised in case of such an event. As expats, it is not uncommon for us to be less than…

How to mitigate the financial impact of divorce

Studies show that expat divorce rates are much higher than average. In addition, while divorce is complex at the best of times, for expats it can be even more challenging. For example, there is the matter of where to get divorced. In the country of residence or the home country? What happens if the 2 parties have different nationalities? Where then? At the end of the day, every marriage and divorce is different. There are no hard and fast rules…

I’m resident overseas, but where am I domiciled?

The formal definition of domicile is “the country that a person treats as their permanent home, or lives in and has a substantial connection with.” However, domicile and residence are not the same. It is entirely possible to have lived in the same country for many years, even decades, and consider it your “home”, but still be domiciled elsewhere. This is because once you acquire a domicile, you retain it until you replace it with another.