Changes in Budget to pensions

bjorn_toby_wilde

If you search the forum you can find threads about the TFLS being abolished going back at least 15 years and often they refer to something they’ve read in the Telegraph.  It’s very laudable of the Telegraph to support the treasury like this but you would think their readers might have cottoned on by now.

HedgehogRulez

i heard that regular savers are a con as you only get half the promised interest!

michaels

If you can do something now that makes you no worse off under current rules but protects you from potential future rule changes then what is the downside?

artyboy

HedgehogRulez said:

i heard that regular savers are a con as you only get half the promised interest!

And my energy bills doubled in the winter even though I was on a fixed rate!

Aretnap

michaels said:

If you can do something now that makes you no worse off under current rules but protects you from potential future rule changes then what is the downside?

If you have spare ISA allowance there is probably not a lot of downside to taking out enough tax fee cash to use up your ISA allowance, and invest it in a similar manner to how it is invested in your pension.

The risk is mostly that people will (a) withdraw more than they can pay into an ISA and end up liable for tax on growth that they would not have had to pay had they left it in their pension or (b) put money that they are not going to need for many years in a cash savings account once they've withdrawn it, and miss out on long term growth altogether. As the sort of people who panic at every Telegraph headline or shock horror YouTube video tend to be at the less financially savvy end of the spectrum, the chance that they will so something like this is fairly high. 

The other potential downside is that you're just switching the risk of future changes to pension rules for risk of changes to ISA rules. Suppose you withdrew your lump sum and put it all in ISAs, then the government left pension lump sums alone but introduced a lifetime cap on how much you can keep in an ISA? Seeing as we're indulging in wild speculation about future policy changes, we might as well consider that one as well...

Albermarle

artyboy said:

HedgehogRulez said:

i heard that regular savers are a con as you only get half the promised interest!

And my energy bills doubled in the winter even though I was on a fixed rate!

I have just sold all my Premium Bonds and rebought new ones, because new ones have a better chance of winning apparently .

Kotokos

Albermarle said:

artyboy said:

HedgehogRulez said:

i heard that regular savers are a con as you only get half the promised interest!

And my energy bills doubled in the winter even though I was on a fixed rate!

I have just sold all my Premium Bonds and rebought new ones, because new ones have a better chance of winning apparently .

Yes, and pigs can fly too, on a like for like basis how on earth does one PB have a greater chase of success than the other?

westv

Kotokos said:

Albermarle said:

artyboy said:

HedgehogRulez said:

i heard that regular savers are a con as you only get half the promised interest!

And my energy bills doubled in the winter even though I was on a fixed rate!

I have just sold all my Premium Bonds and rebought new ones, because new ones have a better chance of winning apparently .

Yes, and pigs can fly too, on a like for like basis how on earth does one PB have a greater chase of success than the other?

I think they were joking.

kinger101

Aretnap said:

I heard Rachel Reeves is going to abolish all private property. So take it all out, and make sure you spend it on wine, women and song before March 26th.

(Alternatively you could always not make major financial decisions based off random things that you read in the Internet)

That's a bad idea. I heard the song tax will be applied retrospectively.

Albermarle

Kotokos said:

Albermarle said:

artyboy said:

HedgehogRulez said:

i heard that regular savers are a con as you only get half the promised interest!

And my energy bills doubled in the winter even though I was on a fixed rate!

I have just sold all my Premium Bonds and rebought new ones, because new ones have a better chance of winning apparently .

Yes, and pigs can fly too, on a like for like basis how on earth does one PB have a greater chase of success than the other?

You may have noticed that some previous posts were referring in joky terms to some of the myths/nonsense you can read on the internet. This was in the same vein.....