Arranging life insurance for smokers can be interesting and raises the occasional question like, I only have the occasional puff, can I get non-smoker rates? The answer is of course No! and depending on the amount of cover required, can be easily detected with a swab placed in the mouth, which can even pick up passive smoking. Rates can be double that of non-smokers but as an insurance contract is essentially one of the utmost good faith, no point in putting down a false answer. While the rules have changed here slightly, the underlying principle has not, see http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2008/06/uberrimae-fidei-bo-diddley/ However, in response to market forces, Norwich Union (soon to be Aviva!) has recently changed its smoker definitions: Current Smoker 10 cigarettes + a day for the last 10 years, Light Smoker and the unchanged Non-Smoker definition. The other side of the coin here, is that smokers will probably get higher rates for an annuity….
Budget Day was traditionally the day for whacking smokers except when things were good or maybe an election was near, when excise duties might be reduced. The Chancellor would save the news about the taxes on tobacco and alcohol to the end of his speech, which this year will be the latest one I can remember - 22nd April - well after the end of the financial year on 5th April. Budgets have usually been early or mid-March, which gave people a few often frantic days or weeks to do things before the the new rules came into effect, usually 6th April. But recent Autumn Public Spending statements have made the Spring Budget much less relevant and since 1997 we have the situation where the the Government says it forbids something like say, some evil tax loophole, but does not publish the details for weeks or even months resulting in a horrible sort of limbo where no one knows what to expect. Last Spring for example, a tax partner in a firm of accountants told me there were three areas where he was waiting for detail to be published so he could advise his worried clients on trusts and other areas. A shabby trick here was pulled a couple of years ago.
When the Chancellor sits down after his speech the papers with the full detail are available in the Voting Office. But some serious changes to trusts were only announced on the HMRC website at 6 pm that evening to come into effect at midnight. Not the sort of behaviour one expects from a country that prides itself on having given the world the Mother of Parliaments.
Moving from the world of politics to cyberspace, Twitter is the subject of latest blog by Mike Southon serial entrepreneur & now guru/public speaker on this topical area http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ce3a368-f82d-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1 You can probably guess who is No.1 on Twitter worldwide, but the No. 2 is a surprise….
Meeting George Kinder again a couple of weeks ago
prompts me to reread his The Seven Stages of Money Maturity where the start of his working life offers an interesting solution to newly-weds who want to balance their individual wishes with their joint ones. They made a deal – first two years his wife supported him while he worked on his goals and projects. Then it was her turn. Problem as you might guess is that his were not finished even after two years, so he had to get real job which in his case was doing people’s tax returns eventually leading him to where he is now.
For most people, there are three main money facts: biggest asset – home, biggest liability – mortgage and biggest pool of money with their name on it – pension. The latter comes in two main types: money purchase – employee carries the investment risk, and defined benefit or final salary where the employer carries it. Employers willing to do this are diminishing steadily and members of existing defined benefit schemes usually count themselves lucky. Penalties for not keeping a scheme properly funded are severe and unsurprisingly some feel this type of scheme is over-regulated and the strain of keeping this sort of pension topped up, can threaten the viability of the business itself.
There is the Pension Protection Fund http://www.pensionprotectionfund.org.uk/ for this type of scheme for which the levies are expected to increase signficantly this year. In a well-timed initiative, HSBC has launched Pensions Watch to help worried defined benefit scheme trustees.
Somehow all the foregoing reminds me of the dictum from Charles Darwin “Survival of the Fittest” and by chance when researching something completely different, leads me to a catalyst in the form of a failed social experiment which may have prompted him to make the journey which led to his famous theory, in a 2005 BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4429006.stm And if IT problems are hampering the survival of your business, you might like to see Saving Money on IT in a Recession, Russell Henley’s blog http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=120514
The uncanny feeling from the research for writing here is that the clock is running backwards. A couple’s dream of retiring in Spain has come to an end with the falling £Stg http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/feb/07/expat-pensioners-income Working in a Stock & Share department in 1973 where the FT 30 share index lost three quarters of its value over 18 months and the posted oil price went up 4 times, was some handy preparation for facing subsequent ones. But the Bank of England inflation report in November pushed this perhaps comforting assumption aside saying it was the worst situation since 1914. There is no one around who can remember conditions then and even if there were, our world is so different one wonders how much use their wisdom would be.
But to leave you with something that will make you laugh, allow me to point you to Richard Lederer’s History of the World according to student howlers or bloopers http://www.classbrain.com/artread/publish/terribleworldhistory.shtml Maybe the old ones are the best.