Thinking clearly about your money.

Investment Commentary6 min read

Why Do I Act Like a 10-Year-Old Around Money?

We have written in the past about research that suggests that, by the age of 10 we have formed our money attitudes.

12 February 2026

What is Happening With Gold And Have We Forgotten The Lesson of King Midas?

The S&P500 index grew faster than gold for four years until 2025. But that was an extraordinary year for the gold price. What does this mean for your portfolio?

8 January 2026

Standard Life Benefits6 min read

Maximising Your Standard Life Pension in 2026

Your Standard Life workplace pension is one of your most valuable benefits. Here's how to make sure you're getting the most from it.

5 January 2026

Tax Planning7 min read

ISA Season: Making the Most of Your 2025/26 Allowance

With the tax year end approaching, here's everything you need to know about maximising your ISA allowance before 5th April.

20 December 2025

Do Risk Questionnaires Need an Overhaul?

Assessing someone’s appropriate risk level is hard. The financial services regulator, the FCA, recommends best practice of testing ‘attitude’ to risk, capacity for loss and knowledge/experience.

11 December 2025

Altor Views5 min read

Do Risk Questionnaires Need an Overhaul?

Traditional risk questionnaires have been a staple of financial advice for decades. But are they still fit for purpose in the modern world?

3 December 2025

Foundations5 min read

Emergency Funds: How Much is Enough?

We explore the right size for your emergency fund and where to keep it for the best balance of access and returns.

28 November 2025

Tax Planning2 min read

What Are Your Two Budgets in Life?

All of us have two budgets in life, the money we have and the time we have left. For most people the money budget increases the older we get and the time budget decreases.

20 November 2025

Tax Planning8 min read

Spend Now, Tax Later – The 2025 Budget

Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered her first Budget with significant implications for employers, investors and those planning for retirement.

15 November 2025

How Much do I Need to Save?

If you are saving for retirement, there are several rules of thumb that you can use. 30 years ago, an American financial advisor called Bill Bengen developed the 4% rule.

23 October 2025

Tax Planning5 min read

What Sector has a 90% Failure Rate and Still Makes Profits?

The Investment Management industry is a behemoth, a multitrillion dollar industry. Active investment managers still dominate their lower-cost passive peers in terms of their percentage share of this money.

18 September 2025

Financial Planning2 min read

How Much Do I Need To Save?

One thing we often get asked by Standard Life staff is how much you should be saving each month. Fortunately if you are saving for retirement, there are several rules of thumb that you can use.

15 August 2025

Why It’s Time to Talk About Your Digital Legacy

In today’s digital-first world, our most treasured memories and personal content are often stored online—photos, videos, messages, and more.

24 July 2025

Should I defer My State Pension?

When you reach state pension age at 66 (rising to 67 by 2028 and 68 by 2044) you will be offered the option to defer your state pension.

3 July 2025

Can I Reduce My Tax By Giving To Charity?

In 2009, when the then chancellor Alistair Darling introduced a 50% income rate for those earning over £150,000 it broke one of our clients.

5 June 2025

Should I Set-Up My Own Charitable Trust?

Many clients gift money to charity regularly and some leave legacies to charity in their wills. There is in fact a handy tax benefit to leaving money to charity in your will.

8 May 2025

Should I Buy My Adult Child a Lifetime ISA?

Lifetime ISAs are only available to people between the ages of 18 and 40. Unlike standard ISAs, LISAs come with a HMRC top-up.

3 April 2025

The Best Investment You Can Make – State Pension Top-Ups

The state pension is rapidly becoming a very nice bedrock income for retirement (we dealt with the issues here).

25 March 2025

Will The Tax Man Take Most of Your Bonus?

Now that we are coming up to bonus time, we are getting more and more queries about the various nasty income tax thresholds.

28 January 2025

Standard Life Benefits1 min read

The Power of Regret

Most mornings I drive my daughter to the train station near to our office, to catch the train to school. We have a habit of listening to Capital Radio and our 10-minute commute lines up nicely with the breakfast show's Bong Game.

21 January 2025

Free Guide to your Standard Life Benefits

We are pleased to announce that our latest Altor Guide to your Standard Life Benefits is available and free to download.

20 December 2024

The Beauty of Simplicity in Investment Management: Lessons from the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund

When it comes to managing money, there's a common misconception that complexity equals sophistication and better results.

12 December 2024

Your Golden Decade

For most people that we see, there is a golden decade between ages 55 and 65 or there abouts.

28 November 2024

Pensions5 min read

Post Budget What do I need to do?

Now that the dust has settled on Rachel Reeves first budget, we thought some guidance about what actions to take might be more helpful than just a summary of the changes.

14 November 2024

Tax Planning4 min read

How Do You Manage Your Cash?

We have a lot of Standard Life clients that need their cash proactively managed. Most advice firms won't do this as it doesn't pay the adviser to actively manage cash.

17 October 2024

Standard Life Benefits7 min read

Coffee and Chocolate

We recently saw the shocking statistic that at 2 degrees of warming we will lose both coffee production and chocolate production. If that isn't enough to make you worry about climate change then nothing will.

19 September 2024

Redundancy

From time to time, and despite our best laid plans, events can conspire against us. At the moment at Altor, we are dealing with advice for colleagues around redundancy and thought we would share some of the most common problems and solutions.

5 September 2024

Financial Planning3 min read

The behavior gap

When looking at past performance of funds or stocks, you would probably think that the return shown is what each investor achieved by investing in that fund.

21 August 2024

Prep Before You Leap

There is a sea stack off this island of ours that is within leaping distance from the cliff edge. It has a green grassy top that slopes handily back towards the mainland.

15 August 2024

Is now the time to sell your property?

One unusual feature of the UK population is our passion for property. Some parts of Europe don’t have the same obsession, but it is understandable when the political narrative for many years was the ‘Right to Buy’.

19 July 2024

Take control in advance

If the take-up rates of wills are worrying then the same rates for Lasting Powers of Attorney are shocking. In some ways a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) is even more important than a Will.

26 June 2024

Make your wishes known

Death is one of those subjects that uniquely we will all experience, but we rarely talk about. Try as hard as they might, even the world's Billionaires will one day die. It is therefore extraordinary that the simple act of making a will is still only practiced by less than 40% of the population.

19 June 2024

Standard Life Benefits6 min read

Transferring and consolidating

One of the most common things we get asked by Standard Life staff is: ‘Should I transfer all my defined contribution pensions into my Standard Life pension?’. This is a difficult thing to answer as there are many variables and every single pension scheme is different. We’ve therefore written below some things to consider if you are thinking…

16 May 2024

Your Long-Term Incentive Plan Options

If you are awarded options under the Long-Term Incentive Plan (LTIP) you may be wondering what these are and how they work.

3 May 2024

Urgent action – have you drawn a pension?

On the 6th April 2024 the Lifetime Allowance regime for pensions ended and was replaced by three new allowances – the lump sum allowance, the lump sum and death benefit allowance, and the overseas transfer allowance. This post today is going to focus on the lump sum allowance as some of you will need to…

23 April 2024

Standard Life Benefits6 min read

Child Benefit

When Jeremy Hunt stood up in Parliament on 6th March 2024 to deliver his Budget he made some changes to Child Benefit, and specifically the High-Income Child Benefit Charge. Campaigners had long argued for change given the unfairness as to how this was applied, and Hunt announced plans to reform the Charge even further. However, due…

18 April 2024

Masterful Inactivity

On December 12th 1953,Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, was trying to regain his speed record by flying at more than twice the speed of sound. His previous record had been beaten by a US Navy pilot just three weeks earlier, Yeager (a US Airforce pilot) was determined to beat the Navy's new record…

2 April 2024

Maximising your benefits

Having worked with many large employers over the years, Standard Life is without a doubt the best in terms of the benefits package on offer. The core benefits are excellent as we explored here and here. The investment options are too as we covered here and here. There is much more though, that is worth exploring…

15 March 2024

Standard Life Benefits9 min read

Blue Bridge

Having worked with Standard Life employees for many years we have noticed several common themes. One of which is that many of you have old Final Salary schemes. These pensions are fantastic because they provide an inflation linked income for life and are a great underpin to your retirement spending. However they are inflexible when it…

22 February 2024

High income issues

Having sucessfully run a webinar recently for staff about the taxation on high earners, we though that we would post the content here as a permanent record. The £100,000 Problem Earning over £100,000 can be very painful from a tax perspective. Your earnings between £100,000 and £125,140 are taxed most heavily of anyone in the…

16 February 2024

Protect and forget

Insurance is often overlooked when it comes to looking after your finances. Most people want to put their money into things that will make them money, rather than paying for insurance you hope you will never need. However, making sure you have the right type and level of protection is arguably more important than anything…

1 February 2024

Future you

We help Standard Life staff members at all stages of their career. Today we are going to talk about those who are going to be leaving Standard Life this year, to retire. We have been helping people with this transition for nearly 25 years and so have some experience at this (more than most people who do…

3 January 2024

Buy to let – is is worth it?

Buy to let property has been one of the main tools that people in the UK have used to build a bit of extra growth over the last 30 years, as there has been a property price boom. This has created a shortage of affordable properties for young people to buy and has led the…

7 December 2023

Standard Life Benefits1 min read

Save More Tomorrow?

For a long time, we at Altor, have been big fans of the 'Save More Tomorrow' concept. It was developed by the behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi 25 plus years ago and it has gone on to help millions of Americans save more into pensions in a painless way. It works by asking…

29 November 2023

How can Standard Life help me plan my life?

We provide cashflow planning and advice, via a salary sacrifice deduction in MyChoice. So that you can see an example of the cashflow planning part of this process we have shot the following three short videos to demonstrate: https://www.loom.com/share/52f5237626434dbab5faac0ded725f40?sid=28323e9e-3d73-4b28-92d5-5ec6866001f3 Video 1 - looking at the Cashflow income inputs. https://www.loom.com/share/b068130e76224eed805c8e880e0f9b7c?sid=d6caf22a-864c-4209-905d-ae7de62abbfc Video 2 - looking at the…

16 November 2023

High Income Warning

This blog wont apply to most Standard Life staff but more are caught out each year than expect to be. This is because the tax man defines 'income' as gross income from all sources before deductions. The most common mistake we see amongst staff, is not including their gross rental income, which can soon add up.…

27 October 2023

Pensions6 min read

How investment risk works

There are many different types of risk when it comes to financial planning, however when we talk about risk the majority of the time we are talking about investment risk. So what is investment risk? Investment risk is simply the risk that an investment may decline in value. As we will explain, this in itself…

19 October 2023

Pensions5 min read

How to pick your pension fund.

In this blog we looked at your three pension fund options and in this one we gave a warning about the risk of option 1 and 2. So for those of you selecting option 3, yoiu have more work to do as you have to self-select your pension funds. In this blog we are going…

5 October 2023

What are my pension fund options?

Introduction to your Standard Life workplace pension options.

22 September 2023

Free money from the government (and Standard Life).

How to get free money form the government and your employer.

15 September 2023

Risky but free Standard Life money?

Last blog post we looked at the risk-free option of saving into Sharesave. This post will look at a different option, the Share Incentive Plan. It has more investment risk than Sharesave but enjoys some other significant benefits. Again it is a great staff benefit and a key option for building future wealth. Pros: Shares…

7 September 2023

Risk free Standard Life money?

How to invest in Phoenix shares without taking stockmarket risk.

31 August 2023