SR2014

Normal blogging service (which as I'm often reminded isn't up to much anyway) has been suspended this evening in preference to Sport Relief.

Budget

Didn't get much chance to absorb the budget news yesterday, so have been doing my best to take it all in today. Obviously the one item that I am particularly interested in is the change to pension rules whereby it will no longer be necessary to use my pension put to purchase an annuity on retirement.

Fundamentally, I think that this is a great idea as it gives me more options of what to do with my money when I retire, but inevitably, I still have lots of questions.

• How will this impact, if at all, on the current possibility of taking up to 25% of your pension pot as a tax free lump sum on retirement?
• Presumably, taking out the remainder of your pension pot as cash will still attract a tax charge, but what if you want to invest it in some other investment product and not an annuity. Will it be possible to invest gross and pay tax on the income from that investment (as currently happens with an annuity) or will it be necessary to pay tax up front, and then pay tax again on investment income?
• The change in the tax charge on the amount over the lifetime allowance is also welcome news, as a 55% penalty on the excess was pretty shocking. However, whilst not directly related to the annuity rule changes, I'd love to know what is likely to happen to the total lifetime allowance amount. It has been reduced from £1.5m to £1.25m, but can I expect that to increase with some form of indexation in the coming years. Whilst undoubtedly £1.25m is a large pension pot to contemplate, £1.25m in 20 years time is a very different amount of money to £1.25m today. Isn't it reasonable to ask for some form of "forward guidance" in this area?
• If at risk of exceeding the lifetime allowance, given that the excess will be charged at a marginal tax rate, is there a benefit to reducing contributions now, suffering a higher tax bill now, and putting money away in a market-tracking ISA (especially given the announcement on increasing annual ISA allowances)? At least the returns on an ISA accrue free of tax, whereas any returns on a pension pot that continue to push it further past the lifetime allowance will only increase the tax charge.
• What should we read into the fact that the Chancellor thinks that the changes will increase tax receipts in the coming years? (Presumably this is good evidence that you don't get to walk away with your pension pot in cash tax free.) This seems to suggest that he expects people upon their retirement to show a lack of prudence and burn through their pension pots faster than would have been the case had they taken out an annuity.
• Is this a good thing? Doesn't it mean that in not too many years there will be a number of pensioners who no longer have much, if any, of a private pension income? If so, what will be the impact on the state and will it put a further strain on public finances?
• And finally, what will happen to the annuity market now that people will not be forced towards it? Will the market work even less effectively than it does at the moment, causing even lower annuity incomes for people who choose to go down that path?

With more choice comes more complication, and more questions!

Lutyens

And so a long day is drawing to a close. Work calls done from home this morning seem like a long time ago. Since then I have been to Wimbledon on the train (starting two new books on my journeys - the new Bob (cat) book as well as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - learning from the first story - Silver Blaze - where "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" gets its name from), travelled back into London and enjoyed a pleasant stroll (photos to follow another time) before going to a work dinner at Lutyens Restaurant on Fleet Street.

Now I am back on the train waiting for it to pull out from St Pancras.

Today qualifies as the most Fitbit steps since records began, and by quite some margin too.

One other thing - the second piece of fantastic news from Coulsdon this week. OK, so it wasn't a £108m lottery win, but I bet that right now it feels just as good. Well done GP!!

Kos

Extremely exciting news - we have booked a holiday!

We decided that the summer was still some way off, and that frankly we deserved a little bit of a break between now and then to keep us going. I suppose it is fair to say that holidays have been a little more sparse than usual since we moved house, and we thought that a little trip to somewhere warm would be a very good idea in the near future.

So for the first time ever, Nicky and I will be heading to Greece at the start of May. We'll be staying on the island of Kos for a four night break in a hotel called "Aqua Blu".

It looks rather nice - check it out here.

(By the way, I like to look back at old posts from time to time, and just decided to look back at the blog post closest to being exactly five years ago, and it talks about my first ever trip to Wimbledon. Guess where I'm going tomorrow!)

Just giving

A quick link for anyone who is interested. Jake has a "Just Giving" page set up for any sponsorship for this Friday's Sport Relief efforts.

You can find it here.

Watson

I remember writing a sort of 'book report' when I was at school, and the subject that I chose was Sherlock Holmes (I suspect it may have been a piece written for the dreaded GCSE 'coursework'). I don't remember the detail of what I wrote, but I do recall being proud of my efforts, as they reflected something I was actually interested in - I had read and enjoyed a fairly large number of Conan Doyle's short stories by then.

No doubt my observations weren't especially insightful - no doubt referencing some of Holmes's well known traits along with his methods of observation and deduction. One thing I could have commented on was the role that Watson plays in the stories - as loyal and trusted friend, and chronicler of the famous detective's exploits. One other point I could have made about Watson was that he never gets anything right, and never fails to be amazed when Holmes sets out his solution to a particular case.

It was probably reading Sherlock Holmes that first got me into detective fiction, and it has been something that I have enjoyed ever since then. One of my favourites is Inspector Morse - I think I probably enjoyed John Thaw's portrayal before I went and found Colin Dexter's books, but they are a joy to read. Knowing that I have never read the last and tragic tale, I decided that what I needed to do was start again at the beginning with The Last Bus to Woodstock (which I re-read almost three years ago) and work through the series in order.

So, that's what I have been doing, reading one of the novels every three to four months. Well, I have just arrived at "Morse's Greatest Mystery", book 11 in the series, and the only one that isn't actually a novel, but rather a collection of short stories. And, it turns out, that despite owning a rather lovely first edition copy, the stories are not familiar to me at all - I don't think I have read it before.

So far, and I am about half way through, the stories have alternated between Morse and non-Morse tales, and the one that I have just finished, called "A Case of Mis-Identity" is actually a Sherlock Holmes story. It follows a familiar pattern, that is to say Holmes receives a visitor at Baker Street who is in distress and in need of his services, and following a few sharp deductions, he appears to solve the case. In fact the story - that of a man who disappears without trace just before his wedding, is almost exactly the same as "A Case of Identity" which is one of the stories that appears in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (The man in question is called "Hosmer Angel" in Conan Doyle's story: Dexter calls him "Horatio Darvill".)

However, whilst the story is almost the same, there are a couple of extra twists that Dexter throws into the tale. In Dexter's version, Holmes puts forward the same solution as in the original, but Mycroft, who happens to be present, then takes pleasure in picking holes in his brother's analysis, and explains to him both where he has got it wrong, and also what he believes the answer to be.

But then, best of all, Holmes's trusty sidekick Watson takes great delight (having by coincidence stumbled upon what had actually happened) in shouting them both down. And so, once, just for once, Watson is the one with the solution.

Nice one Dr Watson, and nice one Mr Dexter too!

Party

Jake was at a party on Saturday night - a Sport Relief event over in Cuxton, and so Nicky and I spent a quiet evening in, TV off, chatting, listening to Z88 (on Sonos) and looking up Orlando restaurants that we might go to in the summer. I was looking up lots of non Disney restaurants (thanks in part to the recommendations of the 2013 Dining Awards from Orlando Magazine. However, the only reservation we made was at the Magic Kingdom - we are planning to have lunch at the Liberty Tree Tavern on our first day of holiday (as given that we are staying at BLT we will no doubt head that way on day 1, plus we've never been there before).

A few pictures for today's post:

Firstly, following up on a post from earlier in the week, the special guest at Jake's school this week made the local paper, and here's the evidence.


Secondly, not that I am starting to post far too many pictures of them, but here's the cats yesterday evening - Jessie deciding that now wasn't the time to be reading the paper, and Coco having created a little nest for herself in amongst the cushions.


And finally, to prove that this Saturday post is really being written on Sunday morning, here is a picture of a sky that is almost Florida blue.