u/strolls

Watch Lars Kroijer's short video series and read his book or Tim Hale's Smarter Investing. Do both.

It's a difficult balance in your position.

Everyone favours ISA over pension when they're young, then you reach a certain age and you suddenly realise this is silly because you'll be able to access the money in a few years - they're basically the same thing but, approaching the age of 57, pension is far better because of the tax.

For most people: if you're 57 or older, retired and have savings or investments outside your pension (if they haven't been through your pension already) then that means you paid more tax over your working life than you needed to. And not many people manage to retire before age 57.

On your salary, you can take £10,000 out of your ISA and put it in a SIPP - the SIPP provider will net it up to £12,500 and HMRC will give you a tax refund if another £2500. In retirement you'll probably pay an effective tax rate of 15% (probably a little less) on your pension withdrawals, which means that you'll pay £1,875 tax on that £12,500, keeping at least £10,625 of it. I.e. you've turned that £10,000 into £13,125 (including the tax rebate you get now); that's effectively free money from the government.

People often don't realise this and approach retirement with 6 figures in their ISAs and then it's too late to enjoy the tax relief. You don't have to worry about this yet, because you're probably going to want all the ISA for home buying, but it's something to have one eye on.

But also if you're spending that much on a house, do you want to risk the ISA with investing it in S&S?

Yeah, but what happens if you remove the drive from the NAS and connect it to a PC?

If you don't have a desktop PC then you might use an adaptor like this, this or this. You will probably find similar adaptors cheaper on AliExpress.

using the safe withdrawal rate method will always give a differing answer as historically that is 4% and even the person who came up with it thinks it should be higher.

As you say, it's debated, but the original studies (Trinity / Bengen) were based on a 95% success rate over a 30-year retirement horizon - i.e. a 1-in-20 risk of running out. Hence the need for a more conservative withdrawal rate when attempting (rough) comparisons between a defined contributions and a defined benefits entitlement.

Have a look at my comments regarding a recent inheritance and someone losing tax free status on c750k because they didn't take advice before proceeding.

Thread is here, to save anyone else searching: https://www.reddit.com/r/FIREUK/comments/1wu2v00/450000_inheritance_at_23_whats_the_best_way_to/pczkhqg/?context=9

Watch Lars Kroijer's short video series and read his book or Tim Hale's Smarter Investing. Do both.

This is one of the major money market funds available in UK - it's very widely used.

https://www.google.com/search?q=CSH2+%C2%A0site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2FUKPersonalFinance

the only maintenance is a bit of cleaning makes it a no brainer.

I see others are arguing the details, but it doesn't undermine the main point to say that "the only maintenance is a bit of cleaning" is a very rosy view.

You have to decide for yourself what you're getting out of this relationship but I would be very very hesitant about mingling your finances with his.

On a personal level I really dislike people who don't listen, can't be told and who know better than everyone else. It basically ended my relationship with my mother when I realised that was what she was like.

There's a scene in the movie All About Nina which really sticks with me, where a couple of characters address their argument (about kitchen mess) by using a relationship counselling technique. "When you do <thing> it makes me feel <emotions> because <reasons>". I don't know how often this works in real life, but it really struck a chord with me about listening to each other.

Hugh James are very good for wills and trusts. Not cheap though.

maybe he genuinely thinks he is finding ‘loopholes’ as he is insistent that nothing he is doing/has done is illegal. But when I try to suggest that what he is doing could be wrong he won’t hear it.

I've met tradies like this before. I can't say they're all like that, but this other bloke genuinely thought he knew better than the experts about his tax dodging and looked down on "workies" for being "sheep". Writing about him now, I wonder if it's an inferiority issue - like he didn't do well at school (nothing wrong with that) and being successful as a tradie make him feel like he knows better than book-learners.

They drain like AGM batteries, if they have a load. They don't self-discharge (or, at least, not at the same rate). But they do have their own shortcomings.

That doesn't address the facts that OP's battery is knackered and that an AGM battery should be fine if the bike is being ridden a couple of times a week.

If your bike is being ridden once a month and it needs a trickle charger between uses then that's either a design flaw or someone's added parasitic draw since it left the factory.

That battery is probably knackered now - you say that the bike is still under warranty, so it's probably not simple old age. I'd expect to get 3 - 5 years out of an AGM battery.

The stator, running off the engine, must produce enough electricity to power the spark plugs (etc) when the bike is running, otherwise the battery would run out on long journeys.

So what does the battery do? It stores excess electricity when the bike is running - once you've stopped, that electricity is used to power the starter motor when you want to restart the engine (and run any electronics which draw power when the bike is idle).

If you don't have enough power in the battery to start the bike then it's either because the battery is knackered and not holding enough charge, or because you've not charged it enough when the bike was last running, or you've discharged it too much when it was sitting.

If you do a lot of short journeys then you might not charge the battery enough, compared to how much you use when starting it. I used to be a motorcycle courier in London, and sometimes I'd do several pickups within the space of a mile or two before riding 5 miles into the city and dropping all the packages within a mile or two of each other. So I did a lot of short journeys and never had this problem - a hot engine is easy to start. I suppose maybe this could happen if you did a lot of short journeys in the cold and allowed the engine to cool between charges.

Maybe the bike's electronics are drawing power when it's sitting? A couple of other people are asking about that, and that could be the cause. Or it could be a fault with the bike's charging system and the battery is not receiving sufficient charge when the bike is running. But I think the most likely thing is draw when the bike is parked, and at some point the battery has been discharged too deeply and it has permanently damaged its ability to store charge and now it won't hold as much charge as it should.

Lead acid batteries (including AGM) are permanently damaged if their charge goes below 40% or 50% too often or for too long. That won't happen in normal use of a motorcycle, because the designers know how much charge is required to start the bike and provide an adequate stator to charge it. But this can happen if the electronics are drawing a fraction of an amp when the bike is sitting idle, and the bike is left long enough. I think this is the most likely cause.

I think the stock battery on this bike is 8Ah or 9Ah - you can easily buy a 10Ah or 12Ah AGM battery, which would be 25% or 30% more power; you might be able to get 10Ah or 12Ah AGM battery which is the same size as your current one, or not significantly bigger. Lithium vs AGM is not the problem here - you don't need a significantly more powerful battery to crank over your massive hog, you just need one that's not knackered. Batteries are a wear item, and you should get 3 - 5 years out of one, but it's not a design flaw if yours need replacing early - you just have to figure out how it was abused.

Sometimes when starting up, the battery voltage drops below 5V. … The voltage, with ignition on and before I hit the starter button, is 12.4V.

This just means that your current battery is knackered. It doesn't imply any need to change battery chemistries.

For many applications lithium batteries are amazing, but they're only one part of the electrical system. You don't know what voltage they're supposed to charge at, what voltage your bike's charging system supplies.

AGM batteries are more primitive, but also that means they're more robust and less finicky. You can buy a 12v 10Ah AGM battery for £20 or £40, put it in there and it'll do the job.

I'm sure I'd love a bike with a lithium battery - I'll get one when the manufacturer ships the bike I want from the factory with a lithium battery, that way I'll know the charging system is designed to accommodate one.

Flog the buy-to-let. Mental to keep it.

Watch Lars Kroijer's short video series and read his book or Tim Hale's Smarter Investing. Do both.

My employment is a bit unusual in that I’m employed under an Irish contract by an Irish company, and I’m paid in euros. I pay tax in Ireland, with some arrangement in place with Revenue regarding my tax situation.

This is an extremely niche tax situation and nobody here can give you more help without a lot more details.

My employer uses a third-party company to handle our tax returns

It sounds like the previous paragraph is wrong, and you're actually UK resident paying tax PAYE to HMRC. In which case, yes, like any other UK tax resident you can use an ISA.

If you have to ask then it's never going to make sense to be a landlord.

You say that "we're not necessarily looking to make money off the current home" but why else would you keep it? Is it Robin Cavendish's home in Drayton St Leonard and you're a collector of blue plaques?

You should distribute your money rationally between saving for the future and having fun. Why would you keep a house you don't need?

If you had £75,000 in cash sitting spare, you would not be well advised to use it to buy some random house in South Oxfordshire to rent out. Here we would tell you to use that money to build wealth for the future - to invest it, and residential property is not a good investment (it's a place to live). Rental income is always taxable, and most people never pay any tax on S&S investments because they never exceed their pension and ISA allowances.

That page is very generic in what it says, but I'm pretty sure that's talking about mum or dad making a deed of variation so that their inheritance from gran goes into a disabled person's trust for their child.

In this case the beneficiary has an entitlement to the inheritance - they're not making the trust for the benefit of someone else, they're redirecting the funds so that they deprive themselves of assets for the purposes of claiming bennies. I'm pretty sure that would make it a discretionary trust.

If you or I create a trust, we do not get to say what kind of trust it is - we don't get to say "I've put £50,000 into the Applegate Trust and it's a discretionary trust, and I'm putting another £50,000 into the Banana Crumble Trust, which is a disabled person's trust". I'm pretty sure you'll find that parliament created a bunch of different rules about the taxation of trusts and it's just lawyers who came up with these names - that the tax treatment of any given trust is judged upon the merits and purposes of the trust. You can't make a discretionary trust into a disabled person's trust just by saying it is one. And OP's brother would be depriving themselves of assets for the purposes of means-tested benefits (which is actually separate legislation) if they make a deed of variation redirecting the month to the trust. As a beneficiary of the will they have an entitlement to the money, and no amount of handwaving or "well acktually"s can make that go away.

A disabled persons trust exists exactly for this situation.

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure you can't put your own money into a trust in order to receive benefits, which is what the proposed deed of variation implies.

A disabled persons trust can be created with a compensation payout and, I think, by family members. But I think this is far too blatant (and the solicitor is trying to be too careful to imply that).

If you could put your own money into a trust, or make a deed of variation, in order to receive benefits then we'd all get our GPs to sign us off sick from work for "stress" when we had an inheritance coming in, and use a disabled persons trust that way. But parliament intended these to have specific and limited uses, and I think you'll find my previous paragraph correct.

Had the testator had the foresight to leave the leave the money to a disabled persons trust then (I think) it would be a different matter. But the deed of variation is important here.

Im confused why a solicitor needs the DWPs confirmation before setting up the trust?

Because it's obviously deliberate deprivation of assets and the solicitor doesn't want to get struck off for colluding in it.

I intended my initial reply to OP to be "the solicitor is gently trying to tell you you can't do this" but another to look at it is that the solicitor is covering their ass.

The flowchart is a series of in-order steps for a reason.

It's risky to invest in S&S if you'll need the money any time soon because stock prices can fall, sometimes substantially, and can take years to recover.

On the other hand, it doesn't make sense to keep money in cash (except your emergency fund) if you're not going to need it for a long time, because cash savings earn barely above 0% in real terms.

The only way to grow your wealth is to take longterm investment risk, so you need to plan ahead and balance how much cash you'll need and when. What cash do you need soon? Will money from your income cover it?

Why are you saving into your pension and a cash ISA at the same time?

On your salary, pension (workplace or SIPP) is much more tax efficient for you than S&S ISA, and you can invest in the same things.

My concern is here is that you're not goal-orientated. You're just "I'm just going to stick <random amount> into my pension, and I have £1200 left so I'll stick that in a cash ISA".

How old are you? How much do you expect to pay for the house you want to buy? Do you and your partner plan to marry or have sprogs?

Between fall 2007 and spring 2009 stockmarkets worldwide lost 50% of their valuation, and took years to recover - that's the risk you take when investing in the stockmarket.

How would you feel if that happened to you?

I'm wondering whether I should sell some of these funds and consolidate everything into a single global index fund? Or whether there's a good reason to keep the portfolio as it is.

You can invest in stocks anywhere in the world. Or, at least, funds that track the stockmarkets of all major countries.

Therefore your benchmark is a tracker of a world index - that way you're guaranteed to earn the average return of the world's stockmarkets.

If you can't answer the second question yourself, "is there a good reason invest in this portfolio?" them, yes, definitely, you should always sell everything and invest in the world. Not necessarily a single global index fund - maybe a multiasset fund like Vanguard's Lifestrategy Global or Blackrock's Consensus is more suitable for you. That's an allocation of stocks plus bonds, which reduces the portfolio's overall risk (and returns). If you've been otherwise happy with this so far them 100% stocks is probably fine for you.

A bigger mortgage would help a lot. If they could get 6x earnings and then hold back on the deposit, or increase their earnings a bit.

OIECs are investment funds. They're the classic British version of "mutual funds" - well, they're more modern than unit trusts, but they're from before ETFs were introduced here.

First one is obviously a fund of bonds, the other two are likely funds of stocks (equities).

As executor you only need to worry about gains since your brother died - the estate may have liability for capital gains tax and dividends. The easy thing to do is sell them immediately and hold cash, until distributing to beneficiaries.

What is the value of the holdings in question? Are they held in pension or ISA? Are you the beneficiary? Is anybody else? (Other sibs?)