Well done Jane ✅

Have you scheduled a free consultation with us to find out about a life changing pension plan?

http://efpg.gi/contact

Different shades of pink across the board but a great effort from everyone in the office.

Breast Cancer Support Gibraltar is a local charity and pressure group which raises awareness about breast cancer and offers support in Gibraltar.

Gift allowance in the UK (the amount you can give away without any danger of it affecting your inheritance tax bill each year) was introduced in 1979 at £2,000 and increased to £3,000 in 1995 but has not changed since. If it had risen in line with inflation it would now be £5,330.

Pension bonuses have suffered the same fate. In 1972 the government introduced a 25p weekly bonus to the old state pension when pensioners turned 80. It has stayed at 25p since but would be worth £2.73 today had it increased with inflation. The £10 Christmas bonus, which was introduced a year later would be worth £102.33 today.

The LTA (lifetime allowance), the maximum you can save into your pension pot while still enjoying tax relief, was introduced in 2006 at £1.5 million. If it had increased with inflation, pension savers would now be able to put away £2.24 million before incurring a tax charge. Instead the allowance has been chipped away at and today is down to £1,073,100 where it will be frozen until 2026.

Lowering the allowance has caused more savers to breach the allowance. In the year 2009-2010 tax year 890 people exceeded the LTA according to HMRC but by 2019-2020 (latest figures available) some 8,510 pension savers had breached it.

India – facts and figures

EFPG has forged excellent relations with an expert in the Indian market with links to some of the best fund managers. Here’s a quick overview of some interesting fact and figures relating to India’s growth.

• India is the fifth largest economy in the world – hot on the heels of the UK.
  
• India’s economy is the fastest growing economy in the world – annual 9.4% growth in GDP between 2006 and 2016
  
• Forecasts consider that the economy will double in size to GDP €5 trillion in 6 years and to overtake the US by 2030.
  
• There are 25 million new births every year – that’s one Australia every year.
  
• The Real Estate market is expected to hit $650 billion in 6 years and $1 trillion by 2030.
  
• India has seen significant growth in infrastructure spending. It’s been estimated that India needs $5 trillion in infrastructure investment to sustain its economic growth.
  
• Initiatives like ‘Make in India’ are aiming to make India a global manufacturing hub. In July 2018, Samsung inaugurated the world’s biggest mobile phone factory in Uttar Pradesh and will double the company’s mobile phone production capacity to 120 million units by 2020.
  
• The country is in a tech start-up boom. This start-up ecosystem is now the world’s third largest and is maturing rapidly. It has attracted over $20 billion inward investment in the past three years.
  
• 9th largest Civil Aviation market in the world. 464 airports and airstrips today, with the aim to increase the number of operational airports by 250 by 2020.
  
• India has expanded its solar generating capacity eight-fold since 2014 and achieved the target of 20 GW of capacity four years ahead of schedule. India plans to generate $200–$300 billion of new investment in renewable energy infrastructure over the next decade.
  
• Tourism is expected to grow by nearly 5% year on year.

As per our previous post about investment fraud, the most important point is to avoid it in the first place. Get regulated advice, get a second opinion and trawl through the internet. Once your money has been invested in a fraudulent scheme it is likely that it has gone. Often any recovered funds are eaten by liquidation and legal costs in a process that can take years to conclude. There are good alternative investments out there than can provide good returns but sorting out the wheat from the chaff is perilous. In the media this week there has been another major mis-selling scandal that has cost investors £236 million. London Capital & Finance (LCF) secured the investment mainly from elderly investors who were looking for a way to achieve better than bank interest rates on their savings. LCF were offering around 9% p.a. To manage to secure nearly a quarter of a billion pounds in investment LCF used the services of a marketing/distribution company and paid 20% commissions on the investment that they raised. Some simple maths here: If an investor is expecting 9% return on their £100 investment, after one year they should have £109. Now, since LCF paid 20% commission £80 needs to grow to £109 – that’s over 36%. Admittedly that is a little sensationalist – although I have not read the terms and conditions of the LCF investment I should imagine that there would be a minimum term of 5 years or so in which case to generate 9% for the investor, LCF would have to make a minimum of 14% every year but more realistically closer to 18%-20% to cover costs and to make a profit for the company. Regardless of whether LCF would have had to generate returns of 18% or 36% – they would have had to take very high risks with their investors’ cash to achieve this. Considering that banks might charge in the region of 5-8% for a secured loan to a small business, why would a company resort to paying 20% p.a. for a loan? The answers being that either they have no other options or that they have no intention of repaying the loan. This story reminded me of an investment that was brought to EFPG a few years back.

EFPG took the decision to stop using radio as a means of advertising a while ago. We thought it was expensive and we were doubtful as to whether it was effective. Also, to relay our vision to our clients (both present and future) is not easily done squeezed between George Ezra songs. EFPG’s aim is to be a lean mean pension machine – we cut down on our operating costs so we can afford to offer pensions with lower fees and no commissions. Obviously we cannot spread this message if we are paying a small fortune to do so. The obvious solution was to switch to social media. Currently EFPG posts a blog on our Website which we then post on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We use a free version of Hootsuite which enables us to schedule three posts on all three platforms. As we do not intend to annoy people by constantly bombarding them we just need to set up the schedule once a week. Our aim is not to simply sell via Facebook as people would quickly get tired of seeing the EFPG logo with a boring sales pitch beneath. Being a Facebook user myself, when I see an advert I feel like my privacy has been impinged upon. So what we attempt to do is mix some sales-orientated content with interesting content that in a roundabout way illustrates our core values; namely transparency, low costs and quality advice. Currently we only boost our posts on Facebook (due to the demographics of Facebook users). By “boost” I mean we pay for our posts to appear on people’s news feeds. In the last week we spent the princely sum of £8.28 and our posts reached nearly 6,500 people out of whom 300 people actively engaged with them. We have seen 25% increased web traffic compared to last month since we boosted our posts. These figures came from the Facebook native analytics tool – Insights – which allows us to see what content we post is effective and what is not. I’m sure we will look into Twitter and Instagram a bit more seriously in the future but for now getting to grips with Facebook and creating content is enough.