What you need to do with your Isa and pension before the tax year ends

Welcome to the Mrs Money Podcast sponsored by Trading 212. Download the Trading 212 app and open a cashizer with promo code TIM to get the 12 month bonus promo rate of 4.68% terms apply. I'm Georgie Fasten, joining me and Simon Lambert today is Helen Crane and coming up. The end of the tax year is almost upon us, so what should you be doing between now and April 6th and what changes can we expect in the new tax year? Also today the boss of NS and I loses his job over a scandal involving loss funds to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds. What is going on at Granny's favourite? Plus, will rates go up 4 times this year and will we see a return to security tags on butter? Could you become a 100,000 pound a year tradesperson? Don't forget you can step state with all the latest breaking money news just go to this is Money.co.uk or download the app but first sign in the suspense is killing me. Quick update on the RACE to 10,000 Simon, are you at least in the black? Well, no. Okay, I'll offer my excuses. Right, so actually I will give you a live update on the RACE to 10,000. Just for context have been on this last week. The RACE to 10,000 is where me and four other experts have been given 500 pounds. Our task is to try to turn it into 10,000 pounds as quickly as possible. I'm buying and selling shares. We have someone buying and selling crypto. We have someone who is also buying and selling clothes unfinted. Someone who is buying and selling antiques. And we also have our investing monkey, which is randomly picking shares and a sports better. Lease favourite, the monkey has the monkey doing? Monkey was doing pretty well actually. Yeah, the monkey was on Wednesday when we did the scores on the doors. The monkey was in second place with its randomly selected shares. And I had to who? To the crypto guy. I know, I know, I know, I know. Come on Simon. Who has been successful investing in something called helium? Right, not the gas. Not the gas. So all about investing in things to do with the tokens that are setting up the sort of global information infrastructure and bandwidth and things like that. You know, it's moved on. It's not just Bitcoin anymore. Bitcoin's old hat. But in your defense, Simon, investing is for the long term is investing is for the long term. And this long term investor is actually attempting to trade because that's what you're doing. If you're trying to make money fast, I am trying to momentum trade. I'm looking for shares that are bouncing that day or shares that have had an upgrade to results or shares that have some momentum behind them. I appear to be unfortunately momentum trading in reverse. And I'm down 31 pounds. Was that better than last week or? Was it about the same, wasn't it? That was worse than last week. A worse momentum trading in reverse. Yeah. I mean, monkey at last count was up 30 something pounds. Actually, I think the monkey, I've got an inside line on this obviously because my colleague Jessica Beard, who was pulling this all together, she updates me on the monkey as she's operating the monkey. Yeah, the monkey, I think, might be up more than 30 pounds now. I think the monkey might be momentum trading in the right direction. Does she have a little smirk on her face, Jessica, when she tells you this or is she a bit sympathetic? I'd like to say that she looks apologetic and sympathetic and all of those things, but she's normally smiling. So what are you saying Simon? Are you in last then? No. Okay. Not technically no. The sports best I was doing worse. Good. The worst than me. And I wasn't doing this badly when we did the scores on the doors on Wednesday. And then you've got this situation where the fashion reseller and the antique guy, they bought a load of stock, but they hadn't sold it yet. So they've sunk a load of money into stock. Now I would expect them to suddenly start to take the lead in the next week or so as they start to shift some of that stock. So I'm very invested in this, especially the vented one, having recently joined, I think I earned about £100, but those clothes were not cheap in the first place. So I would really interested to know how they make money on that. But right, let's talk about the new tax year. It is just around the corner. So what should we be doing? Helen, welcome. Let's go to ISIS first. The famous use it or lose it. Exactly. So new tax year starting on 6th of April. And that means that everyone gets shiny, fresh, new £20,000, ISO allowance. And this is actually the last year that you're going to be able to put that entire £20,000 into a cash ISO if you want to. So the next tax year, April 20, 20, 7, if you're under 65, you're only going to be able to put £12,000 into a cash ISO. You can have up to £20,000, but the rest will have to be in stocks and shares. So we're always excited for this tax year and the ISO season, but it's a, especially high stakes one this year, I think, people. So just on that, Helen, because I really load of articles. I mean, just maybe it's because of high-profile and insurance. I'm alive to it, as it were. But it's all about use or lose it. But in reality, how many people really use up their 20 full 20,000 limit? I think you're right. I think we do always talk about this limit. And the reality is that the vast majority of savers don't come close to maxing out their £20,000 ISO limit. But there are people that do. People who've maybe come into money, sort of had inheritance, who maybe sort of property have made. So there are people that end up through life with kind of large sums that they need to manage. And also people who have just saved over over kind of many years and do earn a lot and do are in a position where they have a lot of money to put away. So you're right. It isn't everyone that can max out. But it's worth knowing the limit and knowing when the tax year ends so you can kind of manage it accordingly. Because I was just thinking Simon, if you do have a lump sum, inheritance slightly different, isn't the advice always to trip feed? So why would you have a ton of money that you could just smack into your eyes? I mean cash is slightly different to a stocks and shares, but is that a sensible approach? Well, you might have a lot of cash, for example. As Helen said, there might be a life occurrence that means that that happens. You might have a sudden kind of sudden payment. You might have a bonus. You know, you might be gifted some money. You might have an inheritance. You might sell your property. All those kinds of things. And if you do have a large sum of cash, then it definitely makes sense to get it into an iso rather than sitting in a taxed account. Because in a taxed account, you're losing 20% or 40% or 45% of your interest to the tax man. And frozen tax thresholds mean more people are being pulled into the 40% pit. More people are being pulled into the 45% bit. And from April, there's going to be 2p added to all of those rates. So the rates on savings interest are going up. And also, you know, the tax traps that we talk about, child benefit removal, it affects that, the income that you get from your savings. There's in with the 60% tax trap, you end up paying an absolute fortune on your savings interest. So it does make sense to get it into an iso if you can. My favourite cash iso is an easy access flexible cash iso. No restrictions on withdrawals. You pay your money in, you can take your money out. As long as you put it back in within the same tax year, it doesn't count as part of your annual iso allowance. But if you move to stocks and shares, yes, you're right. Ideally, what you'd be doing is regularly investing into your iso. Ideally, you wouldn't be in a situation where you got to the end of the year and you suddenly had a lump sum in cash that you were just like, "Oh, I need to put this into my investment iso." But the raw scenario is where that happens. I mean, you're self-employed, aren't you? Yeah, absolutely. You put money aside for your tax bill. Inevitably, your tax bill arrives. You pay your tax bill. And it might be that you're prudent and you're sensible when you put aside more than you actually think you're going to need in tax to make sure that you don't end up under. And in fact, you end up over and you think, "Right, I can pay some of that money into my iso." Or it might be that you have one of those lump sums that we were just talking about and you think, "Do you know what? I've got enough in cash. I don't need the money in the short term. I can earn a better return over the long term from investing and I want to invest it." The important thing is, is that you don't actually have to invest it. You just need to pay it into your stocks and shares iso. And then you can leave the money, sitting as cash in there and then you can drip feed it in. So say you were in the fortune-up position where you had £10,000 and you want to get that into your iso before the end of the year. You put your £10,000 in but maybe you're a bit worried about the stock market. Maybe there might be some things going on in the world that makes you think, "Hmm, do I want to invest all of this right now?" Maybe you might have noticed that over the last three weeks the stock market has been under downward trajectory. Maybe you might be competing against an investing monkey and a crypto guy to try to turn 500 pounds into 10,000 and doing that in the face of a stock market that has tumbled from the brink of 11,000 down to 9,000 something. Maybe you might have heard about some of this stuff and be a little bit worried. So what you can do is you can put your £10,000 into your stocks and shares iso. And if you want some advice on which platform to choose, go to thisismoney.co.uk/platforms. We will see our guide to investment platforms which then also links off to our guide to the best stocks and shares iso. The point is you pay your money into your stocks and shares iso. And then when you pay it in, it goes in as cash and then it's in your stocks and shares iso as cash. And then you can then buy your investments over time. So you could do £2,000 now. You could do £2,000 in a month. £2,000 in another month until you've done the £10,000. We could do those three goes or you could do it in 10 goes. Who do as many glows as you want? if I'm going to be honest and you know, hopefully over time the stock market is going to start going back up again and you're going to start to benefit. But you're also limiting the risk that you put your £10,000 into the market and then all of a sudden everything deteriorates further and the market takes a proper tumble. Is that going to change that ability to put and hold cash for a short time in your stocks and shares? I say as a result of the new cash I say limit. Yes, unfortunately is this is part of the unintended consequences of. We're not there yet. Next year is problem but worth thinking about. No, that doesn't happen for another year but this is part of the unintended consequences of what Rachel Reeves is doing because the first thing that happened is people said, "Well, you know what, you just put stocks, but it's stocks and shares I say and hold a money market fund or actually a lot of stocks and shares I say, pay really good interest on cash because that's one way that platforms are competing with each other." But then it was rushed out that actually no, you're not going to be able to do that, you're going to face a penalty for doing it. Now the problem is is that there are very good reasons why you might want to move your investments into cash in the short term in your ISO and is it right that people are being penalised for doing that? Because the way that the ISO system works and you're not going to be able to transfer from stocks and shares to cash either anymore. The way the ISO system works is, you know, it's detached. These two things you've got, your stocks and shares I say and then you've got your cash I say, you might have the same provider for both, but they're not the same pot. And arguably I think there's a lot of merit in the ideas that we should just have one ISO where it's all pushed together and you have that allowance, you stick really new £20,000 and you can move more seamlessly between the two. And I think that would be more likely to encourage people to invest and that's what lots of people say to me. I mean, the sponsor of this podcast trading 212, okay, is one of the biggest investment platforms in the country now. It's signing up more people than any other investment platform. It's also got one of the most popular cash I says because it offers a really good rate. Now I have spoken to the guys that trading 212 about this and they've said, yeah, people open the cash I say and then some of them start to invest. And it does work that way, you know, and that's a very good reason for not cutting the limit. Now, I mean, there's questions should we be giving people this big tax break and so on with ISIS, but ultimately the allowance has been frozen for a long time. Tax threshold has been frozen for a long time. It's not like we're getting a lot of tax breaks at the moment. If we were in a world where we have a tax breaks thrown at us left, right and centre, then maybe I could see the argument for that, but we're not in that world. And unfortunately, you know, when something like DRR and more happens after the new rules come in and if you go, well, you know what, actually I need to de-risk a bit and I'm going to move some of this to cash, you will get penalised for it. You'll get penalised even for holding a money market fund, which is a cash like investment within it. So people are going to have to find other things that kind of replicate that. The interesting thing will be where the people start to come up with investments in stock market listed stuff that behave like cash. Now, the thing that you could do, of course, is you could move into guilt within your ISO and bonds are theoretically safer. The problem is is that the bond market is hugely volatile nowadays as well. So it's not like that's necessarily the safe place to park your cash. Absolutely right. Two things there. You made a point about the generous £20,000 limit. Obviously, I'm spending a lot of time in Canada. They're equivalent to that, the TFSA. The most you can save is about £3,500. So it really is, I mean, we forget, like you said, we don't get a lot of tax breaks within neither do people in Canada. But how do they tax savings and investments and the returns on them? I mean, that's the question you need to ask in the context of these things. So there is, you know, the ISO allowance actually by international standards is a relatively generous allowance. It's quite a generous allowance. In fact, it's near the top of the tree. But there are lots of other countries where interest is not taxed in the same way. Stock market gains are not taxed in the same way. And bear in mind that the capital is never been more important to invest in an ISO because the capital gains tax analysis has been slashed from £12,300 a year to just £3,000. And it wasn't Labour who did that. That was Jeremy Humph. Unfortunately, Rachel Reeves then decided to raise capital gains tax rates on the top of that. Also, the dividend allowance has been slashed. It was £2,000. It's now £500. It was actually £5,000 not that long ago. Again, wasn't Rachel Reeves who did that. But Rachel Reeves has gone, oh well, do you know what? I'll chuck a bit in the pot for good measure. And she's going to up dividend tax rates. That's kicking in for April. So it's really important to do this. And then also you have to look at it like in an international context of what are the other taxes that people face? Are they tax thresholds going up with inflation? What happens about inheritance tax in those countries? A lot of countries have much lower inheritance taxes than we do. So I think yes, we have a pretty generous ISO allowance, but we don't have it so good on other things. So any Canadian experts, most welcome to let us know the actual rules on this. But I do understand that there's no personal allowance for savings. Haven't looked into inheritance tax yet. Hopefully that's not relevant. They do favour, I think, investing over saving. And it's a lower dividend tax. We'll get onto that in a sec. But also pensions as well. This is something that I spotted. But in Canada, it's limited under 20% I think of your income up to $33,000, which is sort of double the rate of the pound. So whatever that works out, $16,000, $17,000, which that's substantially lower than what we are able to put into our pensions in the UK. Just one question I have about ISIS. If you've got your cash riser, let's say we're trading $2.20 and you've got your socks and shares, I say, I know with a hog who's a referdality. Dad, does the tax plan know how much you've got in each? So you don't go over? Yeah, I mean it's a good question. People often wonder about this. It's the same with normal savings accounts. People say, well, how old is HMRC? No, if I should be paying tax on my savings, are they sort of snooping on it? HMRC, as I understand it, can ask your trading to and to your banks to report on how much people have in their ISIS. So it's possible. HMRC can ask for the information and they can get it. So I don't think they report how much every single person has in their eyes to the government, but I think that it would be able to get the information if it kind of nudity. So it's sort of like a honesty system. That's right, isn't it? They could find it if they wanted, but they don't have a list of exactly how much everyone has in their savings account. Having spoken to my accountant recently, you might think that's too small for HMRC to bother, but he said in the first six years of being an accountant, he said he must have had HMRC look into small people's sort of accounts maybe eight times in total, not often. He says now he's getting it dozens of times a year. So HMRC are really cracking down on the smaller fry as we know, because we've reported on it. Anything else we need to think about before the end of the tax year, Helen? I think it's always just worth having him every refresher on this sort of ISIS rules. So we've got a really good ask call on the website by our colleague Rachel Rickard Strauss, but the 10 known tricks to turbocharge your isa. It's got some really good nuggets in there about how to use the rules, which I think you're a bit complicated to your advantage. So reminding people of things like you can open more than one isa in a tax year. I had this conversation with my other half this week. He realized that his isa on his isa wasn't very good and I said, oh, just, you know, just open another one. I can I can tell you the best rates. And he was, oh, but I'll have to wait until after April. Wait, no, it's like because I've already opened an isa issue. I was like, no, like you can have as many as you want. I think people genuinely don't reenote people who don't spend all their time thinking about ISIS like us. Just genuinely don't. I was like, no, you can open as many as you want, as long as you just don't go over the limit. But yeah, it's got some really really good tricks in there, both the how to kind of maximize your games on it. So yeah, record it. I read that lack of knowledge reminds me of what Simon has literally just said about having everything in one trying to simplify it. There are a lot of rules and things have changed recently. Well, and this is an argument for not changing the rules as it confuses people and people don't necessarily hear the message they hear the noise. You know, how many people are engaged enough with their finances or their savings in this country to know that it's the cash iso limit that's been cut to 12,000 pounds. Or do they just hear ISIS cut? Most of the people listening to his podcast, well, no exactly what we're talking about. But they're listening to this as money podcast. They're highly financially engaged, unfortunately, a lot of the population on and I mean this is an issue with pensions and it's been an issue with pensions for many years. You know, there's a really strong argument for not tinkering with pensions because every time you tinker with it, you undermine faith in the system and we see this and read the comments all the time. What's the point that I only change the rules? There are only take my money off me. Pensions is something that people also do need to consider before the end of the tax year. It's sort of the use it or lose it allowance, but it's not quite because you can carry forward unused annual allowance from up to the previous three years. Secondly, it's 60,000 pounds. So it's unlikely most people are going to hit that limit. However, you do get scenarios, particularly actually with the self-employed where they haven't been saved into a pension and then later in their career, they suddenly realise they've built up all this money in their bank account and then they start trying to put it into a pension. You do have a scenario there where people do put in larger sums. The important thing to remember about the 60,000 annual pensions allowance however, is it doesn't mean that you can pay in 60,000 pounds and this is actually somewhere where people do get tripped up when they have those large sums. You can pay in 48,000 pounds because the 60,000 pounds allowance includes the basic rate tax relief that you automatically get on pension investments, pension savings. So that illustrates the power of putting money into a pension because you automatically get a 25% uplift on it. That's to give you back basic rate tax which is 20% and the way the maths works is if you get paid £100 and then you pay £20 in tax which is 20% to get you back to £100 from 80, you have to get lift it by 25% from that lower number back to £100. If you're a higher rate tax payer, you can claim back the extra tax relief on that yourself. Where else can you get an instant 25% uplift on your investment? Now the one place where it is potentially important to do this before the end of the taxi for people is if they actively want to try to reduce their income for tax reasons and this is something that's especially valuable to those people who will call out by some of the tax traps. So for example, child benefit removal and the removal of the personal allowance above £100,000. Also, things like the removal of free childcare for parents if one parent earns above £100,000. The money that you pay into your pension reduces your income effectively to below that level. Now obviously it's not the case as often gets suggested by many financial experts which is pay more into your pension because people might actually need that money to live on. Life is expensive, tax thresholds have not moved in years and actually this is going to sound pretty crass but 100 grand salary doesn't pay people what 100 grand salary used to buy. It's a very big salary just to be absolutely 100% clear but it's not as big as it was when that removal of the personal allowance was introduced all the way back in the tail end of the Labour government before the Tories came in in 2010. So if you do need to do that then you need to do that before the end of the tax year and that will reduce your income and it's important to also think about some of the other things that you might need to do. So for example, you said most people can't fill the whole isre amounts but if you hold some stocks and shares that are not in an isre you can consider doing something called a bed an isre where you sell them, you crystallise the gain so you basically could use your £3000 CGT allowance or if you go over it might have to pay some tax but you then can buy them back within an isre and that means that any profits that you make in the future are free of capital gains tax or free of dividends and that can be a really good move to make. You can also do a bed and sip and pay stuff into your sip. Now many investment platforms will offer to do the work for you on this but you might be passed the deadline for them to do that but you might still be able to sell your investments yourself and then buy them back within your isre. So 27th of March now you've got until the 5th of April that should theoretically be possible to get the sale to clear by them and then put the money back in. You could also do things like transferring investments to a spouse and take advantage of their CGT allowance as well but you might again be passed the deadline for doing that. As opposed to the argument people say, "God what if I crystallise a loss by selling them but then you'd be buying them in cheap?" Well if you crystallise a loss you can actually claim that against capital gains elsewhere. So that is the one advantage of investing outside of an isre is if you make a loss then you can offset that against any gains that you make elsewhere to reduce your capital gains tax bill. So for example were you engaged in a challenge against an investing monkey and you found yourself to be down 31 pounds then you could use that against gains elsewhere. However I put that 500 pounds into an isre so I'm doing all this without having to worry about tax at all and one of the reasons why I did that is to avoid the potential administrative headache from having been given 500 pounds by my employer to invest money and then potentially ending up with a capital gains or dividend tax bill. Bear in mind I am giving any of this money that is left and hopefully the profit back to my employer will the profits go to charity but the 500 pounds goes back to my employer. Nice. Alright then Helen what's coming up though in the new tax year? Yes so making tax digital is changed to the way that people who do sort of tax returns have to report their income so this is for for example sole traders and landlords so from the start of the new tax year if your annual income from a self employment or property is over 50,000 pounds a year you have to use a specific type of software to do a making tax digital tax return. So it basically means that you have sort of digital records of your income and expenses and you have to send them to HMRC quarterly which wasn't the case before so it's essentially a sort of additional admin headache for anyone who makes money from self employment or property. Also dividend tax that other updates from 6 of April the start of the new tax year and do then tax is increasing by 2 percentage points so that is going up on the basic rate from 8.75% to 10.75% and the higher rate from 33.75 to 35.75% and the additional rate is staying same which is 39.35% Alright then Helen or Simon let's move on because goodness me of all the banks you expect to scandal which results in the defenestration of the boss and I would be lost on your list but here we are. Around 37,500 people are affected, some brief family spending years trying to access their late loved ones money to the tune of many many many millions. Simon when I got the notification pop up my phone the boss had gone goodness me the house of cards. What's going on? It seemed remarkably quick for this government we were saying yesterday in a conversation with someone it's like normally they allow these things to linger for weeks, months, kick up a big fuss etc maybe it's because it's a different organisation to themselves making the mistake this time around they've acted quickly but what's happened is that NS&I is estimated that up to 37,500 bit of reviment claims with a total potential value of 476 million in customer deposits may have been affected by a load of blunders that means they basically lost track of people's savings premium on prices and so on. However that 37,500 people might not be 37,500 people. It might be considerably less, it might be in the middle between that and zero, it might be much closer to the zero end of the spectrum. The 476 million it might be much less, they're not sure they don't know what's going on, they're investigating at the moment to try and work it out but it does highlight that this has been a bit of a disaster for them, a disaster that was big enough for the boss to have to go. Goodness me. When I was reading this I was just thinking these families, some of these families have been trying for years, what's taken so long and where are we now with the money? Is it gone? No, it's still there, they're just trying to work out what's going on and trace it and this is exceptionally frustrating for anybody who's caught up in this because obviously when a relative dies that's a very, very sad time. It's very painful for people. Dealing with probate is also quite painful, painful in a different way but if you're very upset by the death then it can really grind you down. I remember after my dad dies and I was doing probate, having a real problem with the post office, he had a post office savings account. Most of the companies I dealt with were really, really good. The post office was absolutely bloody rubbish. Got a shame. Yeah. And the other people who were rubbish were HMRC who basically, they're almost like a fishing letter that they do to people saying, we know that you used to have this and you need to make sure you pay your tax properly and if you don't we could do this and we could do that and we could do that. They basically say, we know you were a bi-tallet landlord, we know that you owned a property abroad, we know that they do crypto letters at the moment, we know that you own some crypto and then they say, you know you need to pay your tax properly and then they do a bit in the letter that like lists all the really bad things that could happen to you if you don't. Annoyingly HMRC started sending my dad these letters about having had a holiday home overseas that he's owned years, that my family owned years before and had been sold and all the tax had been paid. After we'd already told them that he was dead and they were sending them in his own name and I spoke to them and said firstly, right, I've already checked and all the tax was paid. Secondly, I've already spoken to you and you've told me all the tax was paid. Thirdly, I've also told you to stop writing to him because he's dead and then they continue to write to him another couple of times. Now, fortunately, I've got quite a thick skin. But if you were the kind of person who was really upset about the loss of a loved one, and obviously I was really upset about the loss of my dad, I was saying I wasn't. But you know what, I mean, if you were someone who had been really affected by something like that and you're getting these letters to sent to them in their name, then you get quite upset by this. So if you are one of these people in this position with Ernest and I, this is just going to be extra stress, extra burden, extra pain. And also that doesn't even factor in the fact that a lot of these people might need the money and they're waiting on it and they can't get the money. So what should you do if you're affected? Well, what you should do if you're affected is wait for the Ernest and I in the treasury to get a handle on this and start letting people know what they should do. What you shouldn't do is something like sign up to a claims management company or a solicitor or something and actually tossed the bell out of the fair play to tossed the bell on this. You know, he actually made this point yesterday when he was speaking about it in Parliament. Pensions Minister is he? Yeah. And he said don't contact a claims management company. If you see ads from a claims management company, don't sign up. We're going to sort this kind of thing because it won't help you. All you'll do is you'll lose some of the money. Yeah, for sure. And the same is true also at the moment of the motor finance compensation. There's meant to be an announcement or an update on that next week that's coming out. And you know, anybody listens to the podcast, you know, if you're tempted, do not sign up to a claims management company for that. You basically the FCA has a scheme. The FCA has actually got advertising out telling people not to sign up to a claims management company. I'd like to think lots of our listeners wouldn't do that, but just as a reminder, don't sign up to a claims management company to get motor finance compensation. Well, I think you've said that like 10 times in the space of two minutes, but you'd done really well because I think that is a point worth saying 10 times in two minutes. Just, this is a hard question to answer. So sorry for asking it's time. But oftentimes when we see something like this, you know, it's sort of a newspaper investigation and you've done plenty of these. Oftentimes, if the initial wave is just sort of scratching on the surface, I'm just curious to know whether you think this has legs, whether this is just a tip of the iceberg for a wider problem or actually know we seem to have sort of got the number that basically. I genuinely don't know the answer to that question. I'm not sure. I don't know. I hope that they've basically got a grip of this early doors. Well, obviously not early doors enough and lots of people not to be affected. Yeah, that's the shot. But I hope that this isn't the tip of the iceberg. I hope that this gets sorted quickly and that they're on top of it properly now. I hope that this doesn't then emerge into a whole load of other stuff that's going on and of course, in problems. I was just thinking, millions, I mean millions, we love premium bonds. We love Ns and I. There's a lot of money and a lot of people who've got things with them. So let's hope it's, it is just that this is the iceberg, not the tip of it. All right, then unemployment rates are rising. Salaries are stagnating and the economy is flatlining. Businesses are turning to AI to cut costs, but there is one sector that is booming. Workers in the construction industry and trades, everyone from plumbers to plasterers are in hot demand. Many can now command impressive salaries frequently in the six figures plus a shortage means the good time show no sign of slowing down. So how do you, if you fancy a career change and you maybe fancy a pay rise looking at this, how do you set yourself up as a plumber and electrician? Helen, and what are the tricks that successful trades people are using to earn the big bucks? You have an article in this. Helen, what are the tricks? I think everyone's got that story or that anecdote you have there. I've got a mate who's a plumber and he earns double what I did, but this was good, it's obviously true. People who are doing these jobs and if they're good at it, I think that's the key. You have to actually be good at it and that can earn huge amounts. So some starts from the article according to checker trade, the day rate for a carpenter on average, £360 and electrician £500 and a plumber £480 and obviously taxes and things get taken off that. That's pretty tasty wages. And so this article that we've got on the website is about people who've retrained into these kind of jobs and I think you are seeing people maybe later in life now looking at these kind of things. You know, it used to be that people are going to this stuff as an apprentice, straight from school, but with things like AI taking jobs, the job market not looking particularly good in a lot of more white collar rolls. People are thinking actually, could I retrain to do something working with my hands? And I think it's a different sort of pace of life. So my dad actually did this about 20 years ago. He'd worked in a few corporate jobs and retrained as a paint your own decorator, has done it for years, really loves it. And he only works in the little village that he gets so much business that he doesn't really have to travel and just, you know, gets work by word of mouth and decent wage and a lot more relaxed than kind of going to an office every day. So he's spoken to some people here as well who are doing these kind of jobs and they've sort of talked about how they got into it and they're sort of tricked to kind of making it work and, you know, making it a real sort of career out of it. So obviously picking the right thing to do is important. So look at your skills. Can you do something with all heavy lifting, hard labour? Are you maybe more artistic? Something, you know, something, well, decorating, we have to kind of have an eye for it. What are your kind of skills, first of all? And then, yeah, how do you train? So work out what the right qualifications to do is an Mbq and apprenticeship. And obviously the money sort of comes into it here because apprenticeships can be quite badly paid, but, you know, you might be able to get kind of work on the job and be earning as well. It's really interesting. So I recommend giving it a read. Well, anyone who's tried to book up a tradesperson at the moment knows how insured to buy there. They are, I'm wondering if, you know, Hannah Spencer, the Gordon and Denton by election winner for the Green Party, you know, she's a former plumber and a Sora on Instagram teaching herself how to be a plasterer. I wonder if that's also making women think, yeah, this is something I could do. Well, I will say to anyone and I have a dodgy back. So my uncle was a carpenter, my other uncle was a plasterer. Just watch out for your discs in your spine. I mean, just watch that one. You might want to be an electrician or a plumber instead. Simon, I think the point Helen made about doing it later in life is good as well is that, you know, you might be at the point where you've got to, you know, you're kind of late 40s or 50s and you might be fed up with sitting in front of a screen all the time. You might think, you know, what, I'm going to go find myself a job where I don't actually have to look at a screen. So, you know, plumber carpenter, electrician, you might enjoy is I think you need to be a person who enjoys this stuff anyway and is already quite handy. People know if they're handy or not. You could be other things. Tree surgeon, for example, I quite like the idea of tree surgeon. Oh, I can take the heights outside all the time. I've friend of mine. He used to be an Addison lead driver and then he actually moved to Canada as well. Georgie with his partner at the time. He became a green keeper on golf course. He's a massive, loves golf, massive golfer became a green keeper. Very seasonal that there, I would imagine, because there's not a lot you can do in the winter. Well, especially in Canada. Yeah, especially in Canada. But also you look now at A's and you look at people who are still working, you know, beyond traditional retirement years and, you know, they provide an inspiration to people. For some of those jobs, you don't need qualifications. For example, Donald Trump, there's no qualifications for US president and he's 79. Yeah, that's true. And so he's an inspiration to us all. I mean, isn't he? I mean, he's doing a really good job. And then you've got other people. For example, we were talking this week about who could possibly take over its spurs and save them for the rest of the season with Helen. And Lee suggested that Harry Rednapp would be the ideal candidate. Now, Harry Rednapp, fantastic, fantastic man. For some, I'm allodized would be in there. Sam Allodized is busy sorting out the problems in the Middle East. He's going to be a caretaker manager over there until the end of the season. You look at Harry Rednapp, he's 79. I think Harry Rednapp would do a fantastic job. The other name that came up as well was Roy Hodgson. Unfortunately, you can't have Roy Hodgson anymore, Helen, because Roy Hodgson, age 78, has made a surprise return to management at Bristol City. Or there you go. Bristol City's gains spurs, spurs is lost. I mean, if we want to go full circle on this conversation, there is a possibility that, you know, someone could still change careers who loves gold from becoming a greenkeeper. Maybe we could see Donald Trump do that next. Yeah, I mean, this conversation has just taken a turn. I was not expected. So I'm just going to part the car here. I was just going to bring it back to money very quickly. Good. One thing all of these people cannot do, however, is pay money into a pension and get tax relief, because you don't get tax relief from money. Pay into a pension after the age of 75, which is very goring for the people still working after the age of 75, including my mother, who was 77 and still runs her own business. It was really annoyed when that happened. Right. Okay. I thought you were talking about presidents can't pay into a pension in the UK. Well, that was obvious. But anyway, let's bring it back to money. Shall we? Let's get sensible here. Because traders are now betting, so we're hearing, on full interest rate [BLANK_AUDIO] hikes this year, which was either Bank of England based for a rise from 3.75% that it is today to 4.75% by Christmas. It's obviously down to the fear of the Iran War pushing up inflation and the Bank of England acting to try and dampen that. Before the war, though, bets were that we'd have two rate cuts, so this is a bit of an about turn. However, for all mortgage holders getting slightly nervous about that, a number of economists have told, all of them have told this is money that they reckon markets have overreacted to the war, the inflation threat and its potential ramifications for interest rates. And actually, we won't have any movements at all this year. Who, Helen, is correct on this score? It's quite a difference of opinion, isn't it? Market saying four rate hikes and these three economists who are respected, guide, barklies, capital economics, Oxford economics, they've all said that they think rates will stay at 3.75% where they are now into next year. But nobody's saying they will go down. Nobody's now predicting that we'll get two rate cuts. I mean, probably someone out there is predicting it, but I think it's very unlikely. It is this sort of tension between markets, obviously very immediate, very kind of jittery, very panicky. We're obviously seeing these sore sawing oil and gas prices and they're thinking, right, inflation's got a spike. So, interest rates are going to have to go up rapidly to kind of counter that. And in a way that is true. I mean, that's the point of what the Bank of England does. That's why they raise and cut interest rates. But I think what these economists are saying is the conflict in the Middle East isn't the only thing that the Bank of England is thinking about when they make these decisions. Right. So they obviously need to balance inflation with growth. So as well as not wanting to kind of dampen down these causeways, they don't want to to cut growth too much because then we start to get things like more job losses and things like that. So it's kind of saying it's a balance of things that the Bank of England has to take into consideration. And although it looks like that, you know, this conflict is going to have a huge impact on costs on people's bills. That isn't the only kind of thing that they're thinking about. And I think these economists are saying before all of this happens, they were kind of forecasting cuts. But now it might just be, it won't be cuts, but maybe it won't be rises either. Right. So it's sort of, there's nothing really you can do in anticipation, but sort of keep calm and carry on. Yeah. Essentially, I mean, don't panic if positive, I mean, it's quite, it feels quite hard not to panic at the minute, doesn't it? I feel like, you know, you work up this morning and you're seeing articles like, what would happen if bombs were dropped on London? We're in great panic territory. I feel. I mean, that is rather extreme, but even, even sort of taking it down a notch and reading if you are, you know, articles in the newspaper, sort of talking about how petrol is going up so much, how energy bills after the initial drop in, April could go through the roof, food as well. We'll get onto that in a second, you know, could be going up. It is like, oh, God, are we here again? And I think that's it. People's memories are long, but actually, you don't have to think back that far to remember times of inflation hitting 11 percent over 11 percent food inflation. Nine teams said, remember fights outside blimming four courts and petrol stations. Do you remember that? Yeah, exactly. You're right. And I think the key thing is that, as you said, we all remember the cost of living crisis. I mean, are we in a cost of living crisis again? Not yet, probably, but in a few months time, maybe. But the cost of things, you know, the prices that spiked then never actually really went down in a lot of cases. For example, food shops, you know, the price of food went up. It's not like inflation went down and supermarkets said, I will cut the price of butter now. No, maybe it didn't rise as quickly, but it didn't go down. So it's kind of piling costs on top of costs. And I think people are still feeling the ramifications of the previous cost of living crisis. You know, things like people maybe have less money in savings or no money in savings or they have debts that they didn't have before the last cost of living crisis happens. So I think a lot of people have a bit less of a buffer against things like that. You know, it's been a really sort of battering few years. People's finances and all indications are we're going to be battered even further. I mean, that's a great point about inflation. Let's take food inflation because we're going to be talking about that. I mentioned that 19% who went up to in March 2023. It's currently just over 3%. But it doesn't mean that it's gone down. It just means that food prices are rising, but out of slower rate. And it's built on that 19% that we had back then. So actually, and I remember Helen, you talking about your shock at the price of olive oil up over 100% since 2020. Other things like milk, butter over 50, 60% and it was back at those in those days. But Simon just slightly reassures. I saw, I mean, it's how an earth anyone can say worst case scenario because how do you know how long something's going to last? But I was reading the other day the worst case scenario of food price inflation 8% in the next few months. It would significantly add hundreds of pounds to a family's food bill over the year. What's the likelihood and what will be hit the hardest with food? And what can we do about it? Food price inflation is really annoying. And people have been really annoyed by food price inflation in recent years. And in fact, as you said just then, even as other inflation has ebbed away a bit, food price inflation has been very stubborn, seen various iterations of it. We saw greed inflation. Remember greed inflation, branded products, providers putting up prices by more or accused of putting up prices by more than their own prices were going up by accused of profiteering off the back of the cost of living crisis. Shrinkflation, that's where they don't put the prices up but they make things smaller. A shrinkflation and greedflation at the same time, where they put up the price of branded products and make them smaller which is particularly annoying. A stake flation, that's been awful. The price of stake has gone through the roof. Skimpflation, have we had that one when they basically made the quality of the ingredients? Yep. Yeah. Less good. Yeah. Exactly. So these are the problems. Weather, more extreme weather, long periods of dry, long periods of wet. Fertilizer, that's been a problem. Fertilizer costs, animal feed costs, grain costs, wages, energy. The list goes on basically. And now, unfortunately, we look like we're going to be hit by another wave of this stuff. So, fertilizer cost is warnings on fertilizer costs at the moment. That's obviously quite an expensive bit of farming. Go watch your clocks and farms to find out more. Wages, obviously the minimum wage has gone up for British farmers. This has caused a problem, employer national insurance. That's also caused them a problem. Energy costs, businesses are not protected from energy in the same way that we are as consumers and businesses are facing potentially. Some of them are cliff edge, come April when they might have contracts that reset and they could suddenly find that due to the wholesale price of energy rising substantially, their prices are going to go up fuel costs and so on. And we have a list of the foods that have gone up by the most in the last two years. Okay, I'll start from the bottom. Tinned soup, up 21.43%. Vegetable stock, 20 pieces, so that's stock cubes, up 24.5%, meal kits, up 25%, breakfast snack bars, up 26%. Ice lollies, up 37.5%. Tinned beans, up 40%. 40% rise in the cost of tin beans. You get a lot of energy out of a tin bean though. And it's not clear whether we're talking bait beans here or whether we're talking things like mung beans, cannellini beans and chickpeas and things like that. Is the chickpea bean? No, I don't know. I don't know. Lagoon, I don't know. A pulse. I fear this is a rabbit hole that we could go down and after being, after already being exposed to the, to the Roy Hodgerton rabbit hole, I don't, I don't know whether we need to go down that one. Yeah, yeah, bring it back. Bring it back. So I'm going to swiftly move on to noodle ready meals, up 73.9%. 73.9. Is this because they come in from quite low base? They were always quite cheap and seen as like a cheap meal, £1.20 noodle ready meal. I mean, presumably this means like a pot noodle or something. That's not like a whole meal. Pork sausages up 88.57%. Wow. That's for a 12 pack. That's a lot. And at number one, we have vegetarian mince alternative. Yes, it is the new indie band out of leads vegetarian mince alternative at the top of the charts. Up 108%. Wow. £2.60 for your pack of 300 grams of vegetarian mince alternative. Compared to £1.25. What you will notice about a lot of this stuff is it's probably things that you could avoid. You know, these tends to be the kind of pre-packaged D kind of stuff. Tinsoup obviously, you know, it's soup and a tin, vegetable stock. You couldn't need that. But do you need to buy a meal kit? Do you need to buy a breakfast snack bar? Do you need to buy a chocolate bar? Do you need to buy an ice lolly? Ten beans, but, or could if you need ten beans noodle ready meal? Do you really need to buy that? Pork sausages arguably those are human right. Vegetarian mince hotel. - I'm gonna see if NAIC probably do that. - I'm a big fan of corn, what can I say? But you know, that sort of increased price, naming up. - You were talking to a man who just described pork sausages as a human right, so you're fighting the losing battle there. - That is true. Don't eat pork sausages, but anyway. Simon, I feel I should ask you for a start of the week, but I feel like you've just given me a ton of stats of the week, but you can give me another one. - I'll give you one more stat, one more stat, £307 million. Apparently that's what the Iran War has already cost British drivers in terms of the cost of petrol and diesel. Diesel is wow, phenomenally expensive at the moment. - Why does it go up more than petrol, Simon? - Refining it takes more effort. It can get squeezed by because it's used more for transport, things like that. Then there's the demand from there. I guess it's maybe it's easier for people to stockpile diesel if you run in a big transport firm. If you're able to store the fuel or whatever like that, because it's used for industrial stuff as well, less cars use diesel than petrol. Would be my reasons. There are probably other reasons available. The thing is though, what I would say is what I did notice when I was driving around last Saturday is it does pay to choose where you fill up at the moment. There was a 10p difference between a petrol station and a supermarket petrol station that I saw. So for example, I think one of the petrol stations I saw, which is not normally a particularly expensive petrol station, was 175 for petrol, whereas I drove past a supermarket petrol station that was doing it for 165. So this is one of those instances where it may pay to choose where you fill up. Although do limit the amount of driving you do to fill up because that can be a force economy. - All right then, thank you very much, Simon. Thank you very much, Helen. You can keep up to date with all the latest breaking money news. 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