National Insurance contributions go towards things like your State Pension but they don’t count towards the costs of social care. This type of care is managed by your local authority and generally comes at a price. That is why you have to apply directly to them if you need help with paying for long-term care. Your local authority (or Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland) will first carry out a Care Needs Assessment to find out what support you need. The next step is to work out who is going to pay. Your local authority might pay for all of it, part of it or nothing at all. Your contribution to the cost of your care is decided following a financial assessment. This Means Test look
Following the Brexit result of the EU referendum on 23rd June, a number of property funds chose to suspend redemptions following huge amounts of withdrawals from investors. This led to many predicting a gloomy future for the funds, but as we move further on from the referendum, many are changing their predictions to one of positivity. Whilst many of these funds remain suspended in order to rebalance after the withdrawals at the end of June and beginning of July, in the long term those involved in property funds think it’s likely that they’ll not only regain their strength but will even have increased in value from their pre-Brexit levels. One reason for this is the fall in the value of sterl
By and large August was a good – but unexciting – month for the major world stock markets we cover in this commentary. There were no dramatic gains – Hong Kong was the star performer with a rise of 5% – and two or three markets did their best to do nothing at all, but there were no major falls. Despite bad news (again) about the slowdown in the Chinese economy, August was almost a month where the ‘steady as you go’ mantra applied everywhere. There was a rally in the oil price in August: having been below $30 a barrel in February the price touched $51 a barrel in August, before slipping back again as fears persisted about oversupply. In the UK the month ended with Theresa May taking the cabin
