Worldwide Financial Planning

Most wars hit economies through something far more boring than the dramatic headlines: plumbing. A pipe, a price, and a pause.

The attacks on Iran are being sold as a moment that “changes everything”, and maybe a justification for war. The economic story is simpler. It is mainly about the price of energy, and a bit about the cost of moving goods around the world.

Stay with it until the end to understand the mistakes which are easily made when choosing what funds you are invested into, and recognising you are being told that you are in the wrong fund, pushing you into a fund at a high, or taking you out at the low.

Readers of this column over the last 27 years will know of my deep concern of how customers are loaded unerringly into the wrong funds at the wrong time. We buy a pension and think, great, that’s a boring subject out of the way and it's ‘filed’ into the cupboard with the heating manual.

When there is a death in a business you discover that a partnership can be profitable, busy and well-run, but still be dangerously fragile.

When financial resolutions go wrong, it tends to boil down to a handful of common psychological and practical mis‑steps and, just between us, deciding to set goals in February can relieve a surprising amount of pressure.