by Colin Baines | Nov 2014 | Comments
With two thirds of the population never having made a will, intestacy is a major issue in UK. The rules, originally made in 1925, are draconian and there has been constant pressure from consumer interest groups to water them down. With effect from the 1st October,...
by Colin Baines | Oct 2014 | Comments
Those readers of a certain age will remember the mantra ‘tax avoidance is legal, tax evasion is not.’ This seems to have faded into the past however. Great yardage of print has been devoted to ‘outing’ pop stars and the like who have been advised to put money into tax...
by Colin Baines | Sep 2014 | Comments
In July, rules came into force designed to curb the worst excesses of the payday lending industry. In particular the FCA limited the ability of payday lenders to ‘roll over’ customers into new borrowing arrangements and constrained their usage of direct debits to raid...
by Colin Baines | Aug 2014 | Comments
This is the term used to describe any smaller bank which ‘challenges’ the big 6 (Barclays, HSBC, RBS, Lloyds, Nationwide and Santander) for business. Increasingly borrowers are turning to challenger banks to increase their chance of getting a mortgage as the big high...
by Colin Baines | Jul 2014 | Comments
The Chief Executive of the FCA has issued a number of statements recently which all hang, more or less, on his mansion house speech last October, so it is worth noting some of his comments. ‘Many people think that we have now entered a compensation culture where it is...
by Colin Baines | Jun 2014 | Comments
‘Where are the frontiers between execution only on the one hand and full advice on the other?’ So queried the CEO of the country’s financial regulator, Martin Wheatley. It would be reasonable to suppose that he would have known this. However, he did go on, rather less...
