Article by Phil
Your best financial advisors at Christina Clegg bring you a roundup of the financial news from February 2023:
- The government confirmed that auto enrolment pension bands would remain the same as last year. That means the trigger will still come into force at £10,000.
- New Pensions Minister Laura Trott announced a consultation to review private pension schemes. The idea is to improve pension values for savers. Hopefully the consultation will also address the problem of small pension pots. There are over 20 million currently in the UK and the rules around transfer remain too complicated.
- HMRC repaid £45 million to pension savers in overpaid tax in the last three months of 2022. This is overpaid tax charged on pension withdrawals at the emergency rate. Which is then subsequently recalculated. Since pension freedoms came into force in 2015, almost £1 billion has been refunded.
- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts that the UK economy will shrink by 0.6% this year. Let’s see how accurate this prediction is.
- House prices fell 1.1% in December. Overall prices are down 3.2% since August last year. The average UK house price is now £258,000.
- The Bank of England raised interest rates by 0.5% to 4.0%.
- HMRC reported that just over 600,000 people failed to submit their self-assessment forms before the deadline. Clearly they didn’t have the best financial advisors. They will now face late submission penalties. Almost 12 million people did submit their returns on time, however. Of these 16% were over 65 and only 2% were under 24.
- The Investment Association reported that 2022 was the first year in which there was a net outflow from investment funds in the UK. The total withdrawn was almost £28 billion. Where this money has gone, we’re not sure, but much of it is likely to being held as cash offering very little return.
- The latest survey from LV suggests that over 40% of families are struggling in way with the cost of lockdown crisis. That’s 23 million people. However, 6 million of those think that things will improve in the next few months.
- The UK economy officially grew at 0.00% in the last quarter of 2022.
- Inflation fell to 10.1% down from 10.5% in January. This was lower than Office for National Statistics (ONS) predicted.
- The latest figures from HM Treasury showed that Inheritance Tax receipts were up by almost 15% or £1 billion on the year before. Time to do something about it?
- The number of DIY investor accounts increased to almost 9.5 million in 2022. That was up from 5.7 million the year before. But overall, the value of DIY invested funds fell by 8% over the course of 2022. Overall, there are an estimated £345 billion of assets held in non-advised funds.
