People feel comfortable that they have now been around for many years and extending them to allow children to take advantage makes sense.

However some of the ISA rules surrounding the Junior version should be considered carefully if you are considering these for your child or grandchild. Some of the rules are very familiar. You can invest in a Junior Cash ISA or Stocks and Shares ISA and the limit is £3,600 per tax year. Savings will earn tax free interest and investments will grow in a tax efficient environment with no liability to capital gains tax, for example.

However what you must be aware of is that once money goes in to the Junior ISA you cannot take it back out, unless in very special circumstances. That means you have no opportunity to change your mind further down the line if you do invest into a Junior ISA. Those of you who follow my blogs will know that I am a big fan of accessing your money when you need it. So this is one rule you must appreciate carefully before opening a Junior ISA.

The other important rules to be aware of is that once money goes into the Junior ISA it becomes the property of the child. They will not be able to access it until they are 18. However at that point, the Junior ISA will convert to a normal (adult) ISA and they will enjoy full access to the money saved up or invested over the years on their behalf.

Potentially you could therefore hand over thousands of pounds to an 18 year old that has complete freedom to do what they will with that money. Though hopefully not a problem for the majority of you, there is that small potential for it to be used in a way that was not intended by you. Therefore retaining control over its use might also be something for you to consider carefully.

If you would like advice relating to any of your investments then please contact us today.

Jaskarn Pawar

What business owners know is that the best (only?) way to make money is to increase your income and to keep your costs down. That’s inevitably going to help you make profits. In the world of personal investments it’s really no different.

Investing for income has long been a growth strategy because when the income is reinvested is helps to produce enhanced gains over time. So searching for reliable investments that can deliver income that is reinvested can be seen as a sound strategy for increasing returns.

At the other end you also want to keep an eye on costs. Money coming in is no good to anyone if it’s simply waiting to be sent (spent) back out. So making sure you reduce your costs to an absolute minimum, and in all honesty being a bit ruthless with them will also help you to maximise returns.

You can then take the entrepreneur’s mentality one step further by investing in ideas that may well provide exceptional growth on their own. These may not provide that income stream to begin with but are worth the invetsment for their growth potential (for this you can think of small company funds or emerging markets funds), then you have a business or a portfolio that is well balanced and primed for success.

Of course what every entrepreneur knows is that they are best at bringing people together to make it happen. Nobody can be successful on their own. The very best business owners and investors take advice from people they trust to help them make the right decisions.

My guess is that a lot of people have an idea, conscious or unconscious, of the amount of money they should have, or will have. It’s natural to pigeon-hole yourself into a sector of society or to aim for an altogether different life and expect to achieve it.

However when this balance is disturbed, people become uneasy with themselves. I think that occurs as a result of being thrown off the intended path of life. Imagine you’ve got a mental picture in your mind of what success looks like. You have to work hard, be smart, spend time working towards your goal. It won’t be easy but it will certainly be eventful. All of which goes towards making up the fun of the journey.

Then, all of a sudden you find yourself gifted an enormous amount of money. Your plans are thrown into disarray as you no longer know what to do with your life. That can be the cause of anxiety.

I think it explains why young celebrities can often have problems dealing with their success. As in the case above, reaching stardom could take a whole lifetime of work and part of the excitement is not knowing whether it will ever come. So when it arrives on a plate with little or no effort, no ‘journey’ taken having to achieve this success it becomes a problem. So suddenly it makes sense to make life a bit difficult for yourself by drinking, partying or just spending all the money you’ve earned. Trying to get back that struggle that is all important in allowing you to eventually revel in your success.

I have seen many friends with wealthy parents struggle to understand their purpose in life, failing to find direction when money is not a motivational factor. I think this is an important point for all parents who naturally want to save and provide their children with the very best.

By no means is this an issue for everyone. Hand me £1m tomorrow and I’m pretty sure I won’t go off the rails. However it is an important consideration in understanding people and their relationship with money. This is particularly so when parents and children are concerned.

There has been much written about the growth of emerging markets and many investors realise how important it is to include this exciting area of development within a portfolio. However those same investors have also seen values fall over the past couple of years as the emerging economies begin to feel the strain of broader global troubles.

What is interesting to me is the emphasis placed on emerging markets within a portfolio. Typically seen as higher risk and volatile, professional investors have conservatively placed small proportions of a portfolio into emerging markets.

The graph below indicates what progress has been made by emerging markets in the capital markets. Interestingly, it also shows what proportion of world market cap the emerging markets actually make up. Though undoubtedly a volatile element of any portfolio it is worthy of note that many well balanced portfolios may not allocate  fair proportions to emerging markets to reflect their true position. Some may well do, but some will not.

Therefore in order for your investment portfolio to reflect this seismic shift it is important to ensure you have the right proportions invested in the right areas. That’s not to say that you will benefit from an unadulterated love affair with the emerging markets. Again, it goes back to having the right proportions invested in the right areas for asset allocation is the key to any successful invetsment strategy.

Financial life planning to me is what separates genuine financial planners from the old image of financial advisers, who could quite frankly be working in any industry but just happen to be selling financial products for a living.

A good financial planner will incorporate a desire to get to know you within their advice process. Why is this? I often think as a financial planner that I am in the privileged position of being able to advise my clients on their money. Clients will come to me for advice that they will more often than not take up. The advice I give will be well thought out and therefore very convincing. That puts me in quite a powerful position.

For that reason I couldn’t possibly imagine working with someone in this way without really understanding who they are. How can I tell someone what to do with their money, knowing full well they will trust me, without knowing myself that I am doing the right thing by them.

Ultimately my job, and the job of a financial planner, is to help people make decisions that they would otherwise make themselves were they to have the knowledge and expertise I do.

For so long people have simply gone to their bank for financial advice as some sort of default option. Fortunately now we have many avenues where people can get easy access to much better quality advice (ok that is a shameless plug for our Investment Surgery).

Of course it comes as no surprise that has HSBC been fined £10.5 million and been oredered to compensate elderly customers (in their 80′s) for miselling insurance bonds to the tune of £30 million. That’s just what banks do. They give poor advice, through a poor process and leave their customers floundering in the aftermath.

Today we hear that whereas 93% of financial advisers either have the necessary qualifications to be able to practice ‘post RDR’, or are on their way to being so, just 36% of advisers in banks currently hold the qualification.

This article in New Model Adviser serves to highlight well what disregard banks have for the upcoming changes that the whole industry is working so hard to fulfill so that everyone can enjoy a more professional financial adviser relationship in future.

Jaskarn Pawar

Chartered Financial Planner

Traditionally financial advice has been perceived to be free. You visit the adviser, e.g. in a bank, they provide you with advice on one or more different products and if you take them out then the adviser receives a commission from the bank, or product provider.

The truth is that this has never been free and never will be. Finance companies do not pay these advisers out of their own pocket. They simply charge you more to cover the cost of the commission. Therefore not only are you indirectly paying for the advice you receive, the pressure to ‘sell’ and earn a commission has been tragically demanding. In the case of banks the Payment Protection Insurance miselling that has been going on for years is now costing the banks billions in compensation claims.

You will know this better than anyone. That is, the real truth is that you work for whom you get paid by. Could you imagine working for your employer and getting paid by somoene else? It would be a bit weird and you would question the reason. In the context of financial advice there might be unanswered questions and murky undertones lingering within the advice you receive. So when your financial adviser is being paid by the fund or product provider, guess who they are working for?

If you pay a fee for the advice you receive, we believe this makes the relationship with your adviser so much cleaner and simpler. You know the adviser is being paid by you, and in fact has already been paid and so has no interest other than to help you the best way they can. No products, no selling, just good wholesome advice.

The wealth management process you employ to look after our investments just makes a lot of sense. I don’t know why we weren’t doing it before. Your focus on costs i.e. reducing them, is great for us!”

Mr & Mrs Parker

Robert, 45

Victoria, 63