Hello everyone, I'm Les Cameron, I'm the Head of Technical here at M&G, the team and I are retirement and savings experts. So it's been busy today, we've had the budget, I've just finished reading the Big Red Book. If you don't know what the Big Red Book is, it's basically a comprehensive document telling you about all the different measures that are in the budget. Some of the measures you hear, as the Chancellor mentions them in Parliament, there's a lot of other measures that are also in this Big Red Book and both of them can have an impact on families and their financial planning. So I've just finished it with the mission to pull out what I think is the key things that could affect you and your families. And there's lots and lots of stuff in the book. There's the mansion tax, there's things about capital gains tax, things about non-doms, but I've really tried to just think about the stuff that affects the general population, the ordinary man and woman in the street. And we've got stuff that will generally affect how you save. There's stuff that will affect investing. There's a bit in there that could affect how you save for your retirement and there's a little bit about any money you pass on when you pass away. So they're the sort of main things. The first thing that jumped out is the freeze of the thresholds. You may already have seen reporting of it. It's further stealth taxation. It's an increase in the stealth taxation we've seen for the last few years. What that actually means is if the tax-free allowance stays frozen and the basic rate band stays frozen and the higher rate band stays frozen, as everybody's wages and income rise, you'll see people paying more tax because the amount you get tax-free has paid the same. So that applies to everybody regardless of how much income you've got or otherwise. But I think one of the key things to think about for yourself is it also might mean that you used to be a basic rate taxpayer and you're now a higher rate taxpayer or you could be a non-taxpayer going into the taxpaying world. That could give you practical things you have to do through tax administration or that might just be something to think about. I'm a higher rate taxpayer now. Could I rearrange my affairs to be a little more tax efficient? So stuff to think about there with the threshold freeze. Moving on from that, quite a big change for investment income. For investment income, I'm talking about income from property, income from savings and income from dividends if you've got any shares or things like that. What they've basically done is they've put 2% on the income tax across basic higher and additional rate. So where your wages and other salary gets 20% income tax, any interest you might get from the bank will have 22 or dividends and things like that. If you've got property income, you'll pay a little more tax there. But that kind of continues a general trend that's been on the go since 2000 where you're holding investments outside tax wrappers. It's a fairly harsh environment. There's a lot of tax drag on the actual return you get on your investments. And that's phasing in over the next couple of years. I think the savings interest is 27 and the dividends is 26 and property around about those times as well. So that's something you need to think about if you have got interest in dividends and property income and they're not going to be able to do that. If you have got interest in tax wrappers, many of you won't need to care because your interest in dividends and pension are in an ISA. So if you've got stuff that's not in tax wrappers, you might want to have a think about that. One more thing in the investment side of things before I go on to pensions. And they've announced that from April 27, the cash ISA limit, if you're under 65, is going to get reduced to £12,000. So you'll only be able to put £12,000 in a cash ISA. But you'll have that extra £8,000 because the overall limit's still going to be £20,000. But that extra £8,000 will have to be invested in a stocks and shares ISA. So I think there's no immediate action you need to take. But you need to have a think before April 27, am I a saver? Do I use cash and cash-based things? Or am I going to invest and try and get a little extra return? You always hear about the risks of investing. And there are risks with investing. But there's also risks with saving. Inflation can erode the value of your money, etc. So there isn't a risk-free option to build up your money. It's identifying the types of risks you might take, whether you're willing to take those risks, and able to absorb it if those risks materialise. I think that's probably the key things in the sort of investment world. It's the cash ISA. You just start investing in real estate cash. Investment income that's not in tax wrappers is getting a little harsher than it currently is. And there's that threshold freeze that could change you from a basic rate to a higher rate taxpayer, or even a non-taxpayer to a taxpayer. All things to have a think about. Moving on to pensions. The good news is the rumours weren't true. Pension tax relief has been left alone. Pension tax-free cash has been left alone. There's been no changes to pension tax relief. There has, though, been a change to a method of getting pension tax relief, which is called salary sacrifice. Salary sacrifice is basically an arrangement between you and your employer for you to take less salary. It's actually quite a bad name, sacrifice, because it suggests you're giving something up. But you're not actually giving something up. What you're saying is, pay me £5,000 less and put it in my pension for me instead. The key benefit of a salary sacrifice arrangement, not only the fact that they're usually linked to your employer matching your contributions, is that you not only get income tax relief from your contribution, you also get national insurance relief. Now, what they've said today is that they're going to change that. So your national insurance relief is going to be capped at £2,000. So if your sacrifice amount is £2,000 or less, this change isn't going to affect you. But if your sacrifice amount is more, you'll only get NI relief up to that £2,000. So that'll see your take-home income going down for the same amount of pension contribution. As I said, that's April 29. April, I need to speak to your employers about what they may or may not be doing. in the lead up to that change. But not urgent. The other thing is something from last budget, which is pension and IHT. Clearly very controversial. In this budget, they've kind of reiterated that, yes, it's going ahead. Pensions are going to be in your estate for IHT purposes. So that's something to think about for those of you who've got IHT issues and large pension funds. It looks as if it's definitely going to go ahead. They have made some changes. There was going to be a bit of pressure on personal representatives about having the ability to pay IHT bills with pension monies and all that. So they're putting in some measures to make it easier for whoever's left dealing with your estate. But the whole pension and IHT thing is going ahead. So I think broadly that's the sort of mainstream takeaways for the things that's going to impact the general population. I think the budgets impact saving, budgets impact investing and the budgets impact some of you and how you save for your retirement. I mean, I don't think there's anything desperately urgent, but it's probably a good time to sit down, have a think about the budget. Is it affecting me? Is it affecting my family? Should I be doing something? I suspect if you're unsure, don't know whether it impacts or if it impacts you or if it impacts you, but what should I do? I think it could be an ideal time to seek financial advice. Thanks for listening.