Flat Irons Finance

A State Pension

When thinking about your retirement income one of the first things to research is your entitlement to a State Pension

The amount you will receive from your State Pension can differ depending on your circumstances.

The Department of Work and Pensions will be able to provide you with a forecast in regards to your State Pension. This will allow you to see how much State Pension you can expect.

Company Pensions

Your employer may offer you a Company Pension. Once again there are different Company Pension schemes and the Company Pension you are offered will depend on your employer. Read more »

Ask those who are rich, and they will probably tell you that there only two ways to get there:

Saving and Investing!

Saving is your best defense against bankruptcy.

Make your move on coordinating your finances and list of expenditures that may affect the way you use your income and empower you on your economic stability as a working individual. .

Investing is the answer to the uncertainties of the future.

For instance, if you plan to retire in ten years, and you have not saved a single penny you may have to do bold and risky investment to reach your financial goal. Any good stock broker or financial planner will tell you that each individual has a risk tolerance that should not be ignored. On the other side of the coin, if you are in your early twenties and you want to start investing for your retirement, your risk tolerance will be low.You can afford to watch your money grow slowly over time. Read more »

While we understand that to invest in a unit trust carries certain risk, especially so when the unit trust carries lots of equity component and more so if the investment is on foreign market. It is repeatedly emphasize on my previous article that studies need to be done before investing in unit trust or investor will risk losing big chunk of his investment for nothing but being lazy, the very first part of studies we need to do is on the master prospectus or the proposal prepared by the fund manager; on this single master prospectus it contain almost all the information that an investor needs which include the percentage of investment on each sector & industry that the fund invested in; investor will also find information that provide a benchmark for investor to compare the fund performance against the benchmark of the country such as the stock exchange. But however the benchmark studies is on an average basis and does not truly provide an accurate comparison, it is however good to take note on this comparison studies as a guide for all of us.

Identifying these investment sector & industry is important as the performance of the economy as a whole will reflect on the performance of the fund as well, for example if a particular fund have its investment 70% on equity and out of this 70% equity stake 60% is on a particular company equity then investor might want to keep an eye of that company performance and equity price. It is important for us to know the some information of the industry that the unit trust invested in, to study its profitability and the risk involve in the investment. The most important component will be the major sector and industry that the fund invested in while other smaller component is not as important as those in major component. In most cases, investor themselves are not aware of this information and what their unit trust invest in which result in poor self management and at the end investor themselves are at the losing end. Read more »