News & Insights

For some non-resident alien retirement planners in the United States municipal bonds represent a useful way to preserve wealth while also creating a tax-free income stream. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), they are an item "of income excluded from gross income, without regard to the U.S. or foreign status of the owner of the income".*

Ever since the 2015 introduction UK pension freedoms, pension transfers have been central to the wealth management and retirement planning strategies of hundreds of thousands of individuals with UK-based defined benefit pension schemes.

However, given that it is only four years since their introduction, it is safe to say that these pension freedoms remain in their infancy and there is, perhaps, room for further evolution in this area.

Our new "Spotlight On…" feature focuses on the team and will offer insights into their specialist services for Blacktower clients in the US.

In our new TOP TIPS feature our experts provide essential information and guidance on the issues that affect expats in the USA.

As part of our new NEWS WRAP feature we take a look at an industry-related news item which directly affects our business and our clients.

In our new FAQ feature, Chris Thornton, Country Manager in the US, answers a frequently asked question about the relevance of currency and exchange rates in retirement planning.

It's funny to think that our investing decisions might be coloured by the way society views certain words – i.e. 'active' is good, 'passive' is bad.

But when it comes to retirement investing, the decision just isn't that binary. And attempting to make a decision between passive investing versus active investing is likely to be a false dichotomy as elements of both should be utilised together to form a part of a successful retirement strategy.

Here we take a look at these retirement investment approaches and how they might form part of your retirement investment planning.

For a long time economists formulated their theories on the assumption that investors behave rationally and make explicable decisions. In fact, this belief helped underpin the very notion of the Efficient Market Hypothesis; a theory developed by Eugene Fama (University of Chicago) and Ken French (MIT), which states that share prices reflect all information which is readily available

Nowadays, even the proponents of EMH know that randomness and irrationality are constant features of investor behaviour, if not the market as a whole. However, such behaviours are likely to prove detrimental to an investors' long-term financial goals and are precisely why a wealth manager or financial advisor should be considered as an essential part of the investing journey. Professional advice brings discipline and guards against the kind of irrational and emotionally-motivated investment decisions that have the ability to undermine even the best-laid plans.