Benefits suggestions

[This post is just being used as a way to add more than 300 characters to a Conservative Party survey form.]

Object is to provide State support for a minimum level of income for any individual - £x per adult and £y per child on an age-related scale + £z special requirements (medical, disability etc. on another scale where appropriate)

Support = total - income from all sources.

End all national support schemes like free fares, prescriptions, fuel etc (local councils can still provide optionally what electors there approve / agree to fund but no general tax liability).

May sound like extreme means testing but that is only fair way and technology makes that easier than before. This can also work as unemployment benefit with proviso that anyone capable of work must take reasonable offer of work for benefit to continue. People will argue about 'reasonable' but agreement somewhere along the range is feasible.

Those with assets but no income would receive same benefit but if below pensionable age the total paid would represent a charge on their assets on sale or death. This avoids someone living in a valuable house or owning expensive items having to sell at an inopportune time and negates criticism of support for the 'wealthy' at the same time. State Pensions could probably be included in the benefit too but allowance will have to be made as people think they have 'saved NI conts' for these so some phased system required there or the opposition will have a field day.

Current complex system has evolved by tinkering over 60+ years and has become hugely expensive to administer with professionals thriving even on interpretative services. Total and complete fresh start required. Brave. Difficult to envisage but will produce a cheaper, fairer end product where other parties can only really argue about the numbers x, y, z etc rather than the basic concept and objectives which are pretty much unarguable.

Something for the weekend?

All these cars are currently available at less than £4000 each and pretty much immaculate, ready to drive and, although not as perfect as the exhibition collectors want, certainly seem pretty damn good and could make decent investments as well as enjoyable for running around in from time to time.

1978 Fiat 124 Spider 2000

1977 Ford Granada Ghia Coupe

1967 Humber Sceptre

1969 Rover 3.5 P5B Saloon

1975 Triumph 2000

1976 Triumph 2500TC

1966 Vanden Plas 1100

1967 Vanden Plas Princess R

1972 Wolseley 1300 MkII

LOTR Project / Statistics

Wonderful sets of statistics from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit!

Learn about data visualization tools.

It's Eight Years Since 'Lost' Began

Kirri goes shopping

Mark Radcliffe on The Music of The Monkees

More grey matter - something extra for many UK people planning to retire soon.

Quite why my brain is presenting such strangely grey matters instead of suggesting that I sit back and just watch The Jonathan Ross Show I do not know but another 'too good to miss' thing springs to mind. This is for the older folk...

UK tax legislation currently permits contributions to an occupational pension scheme to be deducted from gross pay before tax is assessed. So placing £1000 in your pension scheme will actually only cost you £800, possibly a lot less but let's keep the sums simple for now.

Now that is sort of OK if you're several years away from retirement but becomes really quite wonderful if you're retiring in a year's time. Even if your fund achieves 0% growth over the last year you get 25% on your investment. And you should be able to take a cash sum on retirement so you do actually get to take the £1000 in readies and that's tax free. At least 25%, in most cases substantially more. Tax free.

Yes, there are all sorts of limits, both to the proportion of your earnings that you can contribute and in the amount that can taken as cash but it's easy enough to get the figures that apply in your own case and there's bound to be some opportunity that someone expecting to retire soon can take advantage of.

Individual pension arrangement contributions can also be particularly attractive investments in that last year or so - the rules are a little different but have similar effect at the end of the day. Even if you don't have a bundle of cash to throw in to the scheme it could well be the case that it's well worth borrowing (at modest bank lending rates) as much as you can extract later.

There have been dark whispers of some taxation advantages being removed so, as with the stamps, I have to say that things may change or not work out so attractively in the future. This has, though, been the case for nearly 40 years and is pretty darned unlikely to disappear soon, unless Chancellor George Osborne loses his mind completely. You do also need to get good advice, especially if you're thinking of really maximising this beyond what most HR or Finance department staff should be able to deal with as normal practice.

Collecting stamps just got very interesting

It looks like postage rates are about to increase really quite substantially, with 2nd Class rumoured to go from 36p to 55p and 1st Class from 46p to goodness knows what. A similar percentage increase would take it to around 70p.

This got me thinking. For over 20 years now it's been possible to buy stamps with a 1st or 2nd indicator rather than a specific stated value figure. In 1990 you could have bought a 1st Class stamp for 20p. If you still had it, it could be used to pay the current 46p First Class rate. That's something like a 4% pa increase. In other words, you would have had to get 4% interest each year on a 20p investment to have 46p now.

That's neither one thing nor another, I suppose, and, in fact, quite a few of those 1990 20p stamps could be worth considerably more - more like £5 if you have a certain type that wasn't particularly uncommon and lots more if you happened to have one of the rarer types. But that's another story. Let's look at what's happened more recently: you may have bought one for 30p in 2005. Now that has increased in value by a more respectable 7½% pa.

Even more recently, a 2008 1st Class would have cost you 36p and that has increased by a quite decent 9% pa. Not many investments that could be guaranteed not to lose their value, and have a reasonable market for actually selling in, have done that over this period.

"But I used the ones I bought", you say, reasonably enough, "So what's the point?" 


Well, if you buy a 1st Class stamp now for 46p and in a month or so you can use it for 70p's worth of postage then you could get an absolutely massive return on your money. Even if you don't see people rushing to buy stamps from you in a few weeks at 70p, they might be more interested in ordering a few if you charged, say, 60p. Now that's a fine 14% discount for them and an even finer 35% or so return for you. In a few weeks!

OK, we don't know for sure that the rate hike will be that big and there is, I suppose, a chance that Royal Mail might decide not to permit old NVI stamps (No Value Indicators) to be used after the date of the increase. That would be surprising and go against the whole concept of the NVIs issued to date and it would also require the issue of a brand new different stamp that we could use. I don't see that happening - at least not in the short term.

So, go buy £1000 worth of 1st or 2nd Class stamps. If you're likely to use them anyway over the next year you'll be getting £1500's worth on my estimates. If you only use one or two at Christmas and people's birthdays then sell them to someone who does use lots. Or hang on for an even greater return! But be quick - although, as the chart illustrates, prices have risen faster than RPI inflation generally, so they may just represent a pretty decent longer term investment too.

I guess I have to conclude by saying that I have no knowledge of what the new price may be, or even whether it will go up at all. It may even go down. It's just a thought. Quite a good one, possibly.

Sounds of the 60s

Way back in the 1960s I would be barricaded in my room with Alan Freeman's Top 20 Show playing on a transistor radio. With copies of NME and Record Mirror on the floor, I knew roughly when the tracks I wanted would be coming up and sat patiently with the reel-to-reel tape recorder on pause and a microphone placed in the best place to pick up the sound with as little interference as was feasible with this very basic kit.

Here's the 40-odd years on version. Funny how it's much as it used to be. Total Recorder software replaces the reel-to-reel and some bits and pieces inside my PC that have names but not names I can tell you replace the microphone. The radio is BBC's iPlayer with its playlist to give me an idea of what comes when. It's nice, though, to be able to try again if I miss the start of something as editing the mp3 file is a damn sight easier than snipping bits of tape out and joining them together again with Selotape.

Just as amateur but at least someone coming in doesn't wreck the recording!