Seventy wise men in Portugal have published a manifesto for changes in this country. They suggest prolonging the interest repayment installments and dropping the interest rates payable on Portugal’s loans, as in Greece.

The Dutch-Swedish Professor Stefan de Vylder and Jack Soifer propose the same approach, changing part of the country’s debt into credits to be used by the creditors’ clients, e.g, German, British and Dutch corporations would be issued vouchers to exchange for imports from Portuguese companies. This would raise the competitiveness of Portuguese companies and bring jobs.

In our view, there are five key aspects that you need to address to ensure you obtain the optimum investment portfolio to suit you and your particular situation:

A summary of the key announcements in George Osborne’s Budget of 19th March. Many of the changes revealed were re-announcements from the Autumn Statement of little more than three months ago.

Nevertheless, the improving economic landscape did allow the Chancellor to spring a few surprises.

Important information if you for British Expats with an existing UK pension. Take your whole pension as a lump sum. Yesterdays budget may have included probably the most important pension news announced in decades.

It has been proposed that pension investors who have reached age 55, should now be able to take the whole of their pension as a lump sum.

Do you own property in the UK?  If you do, and are not resident there, you need to be aware of changes to capital gains tax coming in next year.  Whereas you may be able to avoid UK tax if you sell the property now, if you wait a year it will be a different story.

We are entering a new era for international tax planning. Financial privacy is no more. 2013 saw unprecedented support for global automatic exchange of information and a pivotal move to multilateral tax agreements. Now, in a concrete step forward, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has released the new global standard for the automatic exchange of financial information. It will apply from the end of next year.

No change on interest rate last week….The Bank of England stayed 0.5%, an all time low for 5 years. And, Mario Draghi held his nerve based on more positive consumer data from France, Spain and Germany.
Let’s hope the geo-political situation in the Crimea does not rein back the slow charge to improving economic climates….even the Euro got a chance to come back at Sterling………..CLICK HERE.

The three main principles for investing for growth are: time in the market; spread the risk and regular reviews. Last week I discussed how time in the market is usually more beneficial for individual investors than timing the market.