Informed Choice Radio Personal Finance Podcast

My guest today on Informed Choice Radio is Alice Tapper, the Founder of Go Fund Yourself, an online platform and community which makes personal finance relatable. She also works with start-ups and financial institutions to help them develop new products and communications. Previously, Alice was a management consultant. She has a degree in Economics and an MSc in Behavioural Economics. Her new book Go Fund Yourself isn't about cutting back on coffee or walking to work and it definitely isn't about becoming a bazillionaire overnight. Alice doesn't believe in telling you what you should and shouldn't spend your money on. Instead, her book combines time-tested, expert advice with fresh insights into how money works today and how you can earn, spend and invest your way towards living your best life. Through the lens of five topics: Learn it, Earn it, Start it, Spend it and Invest it, Alice covers all the essentials that we should have been taught at school, but weren't. Here's my conversation with Alice Tapper, author of Go Fund Yourself, in episode 437 of Informed Choice Radio.

Today on the show, I'm talking about proposals to make civil partnerships available to opposite-sex couples, and the financial advantages this would bring. There's also a roundup of the latest personal finance news, and a cautionary tale in the aftershow; don't drink the water from the lake at Hever Castle! Millions of unmarried couples could be better off financially following new government proposals. The proposals are designed to extend civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples, resulting in these individuals becoming entitled to a range of financial wins.

If you spent one hour a month nurturing your finances for the next twelve months, how would you feel this time next year? What would be different? Mapping out a plan for achieving your big goals and managing everyday spending is the goal of Money Lessons, the new book from financial expert Lisa Conway-Hughes. Lisa is a qualified Financial Advisor with fifteen years' experience and a Fellow of the Personal Finance Society. She blogs as her alter ego Miss Lolly, offering unbiased financial wisdom, especially for younger women. Lisa's opinions have featured in the Guardian, Financial Times, Telegraph, Independent, Glamour and Citywire as well as on BBC News, discussing subjects such as The Budget. She gives regular corporate talks and has recently started a podcast called 'She's On The Money'. Here's my conversation with Lisa Conway-Hughes, Miss Lolly, in episode 435 of Informed Choice Radio.

Martin and Nick chat in the Sundial House Courtyard ahead of celebrations for the 25th anniversary of Informed Choice, which started in 1994. They talk about the early days of the business, finding the offices, how regulation has changed during this time, Nick's role in applying for Chartered status for the profession, and what Informed Choice looks like today.

Common misconceptions, assumptions, and behavioral biases often prevent people from building robust and flexible retirement plans—and this is an enormous problem. If you don’t know your decisions are based on false assumptions, how can you avoid making serious mistakes? My guest on the podcast today describes himself as a 'pracademic' when it comes to the field of retirement planning. That's 'practical academic'. Jamie Hopkins is a leading retirement planning expert in the US. He is a professor of taxation at the American College of Financial Services and the director of the New York Life Center for Retirement Income. Jamie's new book is called Rewirement: Rewiring The Way You Think About Retirement!. The book is all about how to identify problems that might sabotage your savings while learning how to build and implement the retirement plan you need. In our conversation today, we talk about how our money decision making is often coloured by personal experiences, some of the risks in retirement including the sequence of investment returns you face, and why being too conservative with your money in later life is often more dangerous than taking risks. Here's my conversation with Jamie Hopkins, author of Rewirement, in episode 433 of Informed Choice Radio.

I had a conversation yesterday with a lady I know. Not a client, I should add. She's recently discovered that a quarter of her pension pot is invested in Woodford Equity Income, where trading remains suspended. The first she heard about her exposure to the fund was when her pension provider wrote to her to let her know it wasn't possible to buy or sell units. Interestingly, her independent financial adviser didn't tell her and hasn't been responding to her subsequent queries. Now leaving aside the ability or otherwise for financial advisers to spot the risks associated with this Woodford Equity Income fund, there are some important issues at stake here. This lady's financial adviser described the fund in one letter to his client as 'low to medium risk'. I've not seen the letter, and risk names like low to medium are fairly meaningless without detailed descriptions. But personally I don't think any fund which invests in unquoted companies could be described as low to medium risk. The lack of communication is another cause for concern. Why did this lady have to find out from her pension provider, and not her financial adviser, that she had a quarter of her pension pot tied up in this fund? And it sounds like the communication since has been dire. As a friend, I was able to explain to her the reasons behind the fund suspension, and what might happen next; we still don't know a) when the fund will reopen, or b) what the unit price might be when that happens. Woodford's Patient Capital Trust, his investment trust, has fallen in value by around a third in the past few weeks, which could give some indication of what might happen to his Equity Income fund, when trading eventually resumes. The liquidity of investment funds has come into sharp focus in recent weeks, following the trading suspension imposed on investors in the Woodford Equity Income fund.

What can the ideas of history's greatest economists tell us about the most important issues of our time? Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have grappled with a series of familiar problems - but often their ideas are hard to digest, before we even try to apply them to today's issues. My guest today is Dr Linda Yueh, an accomplished economist, and leading writer and broadcaster in this field. In her new book, The Great Economists, she explains the key thoughts of history's greatest economists, how their lives and times affected their ideas, how our lives have been influenced by their work, and how they could help with the policy challenges that we face today. Linda Yueh is a fellow in economics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, adjunct professor of economics at London Business School, and visiting professor at LSE IDEAS. Dr. Yueh has been an advisor to, among others, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the Asian Development Bank. She is also a broadcaster and was the presenter of Talking Business with Linda Yueh when she was BBC Chief Business Correspondent as well as the former Economics Editor at Bloomberg TV. Here’s my conversation with Dr Linda Yueh, author of The Great Economists, in episode 431 of Informed Choice Radio.

The suitability of advice to transfer from a defined benefit (DB) pension scheme to a personal pension has faced a great deal of regulatory scrutiny in the past couple of years. Deciding to transfer a promise of guaranteed income to the uncertainty of an invested capital value is far from simple. This choice represents one of the most complex personal finance decisions we will ever have to make. As a result of this complexity involved, it’s right that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) subjects advisers who offer this advice to a high level of scrutiny. The consequences for an investor making the wrong choice to transfer are severe and potentially very damaging to wealth in retirement. The FCA has repeatedly communicated what it expects from financial advisers who advise transferring (or retaining) a defined benefit pension. They have also been taking more enforcement action against the minority of adviser who fails to live up to the high standards expected. In their latest update, the FCA has concluded that too much DB transfer advice remains below their acceptable standard.

If the most precious thing we have is time, the most highly prized expertise should be knowing how to spend it well. Yet, busier than ever, do we really understand which experiences bring us joy and success, and which don’t? After all, we’ve learned how to spot the difference between junk foods and superfoods. When you discover the equivalent rules for time, it’ll change how you live your life. My guest on the show today is James Wallman, author of one of my favourite books, Stuffocation. And now in fact author of two of my favourite books, because James is back with his new book, Time and How to Spend It. In the book, James investigates the persistent problem of wasted, unfulfilling time, and finds a powerful answer ― a revolutionary approach to life based on the latest scientific discoveries. At the heart of Time and How to Spend It is the inspiring revelation that, when you play by the new rules, you can actively choose better experiences. This is one of my favourite podcast interviews to date, and that's saying something with more than 220 guest interviewed recorded for Informed Choice Radio. Listen out for James explaining why it's not a lack of free time that's the issue, but choosing to spend that free time on our mobile phones; and why charging your phone outside of the bedroom leads to better sleep and more sex. We talk about experience intelligence, biophilia, and how doing things for other people leads to more happiness, and success. Here's my conversation with James Wallman, author of Time and How to Spend It, in episode 429 of Informed Choice Radio.

In the world of Financial Planning, the goal when it comes to tax is to pay as little as necessary. This approach is legal tax avoidance, rather than illegal tax evasion, and it involves making use of available allowances and reliefs to manage your tax affairs most efficiently. But what happens when you pay too little tax? According to some new research, around a third of taxpayers who use self-assessment could be paying too little. In this episode, Martin talks about the scale of the issue and shares some tips for dealing with tax underpayments.