The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne delivered his Budget to Parliament on 19th March. By far the biggest surprise was the announcement of a complete overhaul to the pension regime.
Growth, the deficit and borrowing were at the heart of Mr Osborne’s speech, with the Chancellor making it clear this was a budget to support a resilient economy with savers at the centre.
2013 saw the biggest tax hikes in modern history come into effect on Portugal, considerably increasing the tax burden for Portuguese residents. The 2014 Budget did not include similar tax rises or any radical tax reforms, but taxes remain high.
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.
