Author: Helen Barklam

What is compound interest? Compound interest is arguably the most important concept in finance. Think of it as the ‘snowball’ effect – the concept that capital re-invested will grow at an ever-increasing absolute rate. Compound interest can be defined as the interest generated from an investment plus all of the interest generated from the interest that has accumulated over time. The tables below illustrate how the effect of compound interest can have a significant impact after a short period of time. In the first table, annual interest payments received are not reinvested resulting in interest payments remaining static across the…

Welcome to our Stamp Duty Calculator, a simple and easy-to-use tool for calculating the stamp duty fees associated with buying a property in the UK. Stamp duty is a tax that is applied to most property purchases in the UK. The amount of stamp duty you are required to pay depends on the value of the property and your personal circumstances. Our calculator takes these factors into account to provide an accurate estimate of the stamp duty fees you can expect to pay. Simply enter the purchase price of the property, your residential status, and any applicable concessions, and our…

We commonly get asked if Premium Bonds are worth buying, probably because people are unclear as to what they actually are and how they compare to other possible homes for your money such as bank savings accounts or the stock market. So let’s start with what ‘Premium Bonds’ actually are. Premium Bonds are a popular savings product created by NS&I (National Savings and Investments), which is backed by the UK Treasury. We generally think of Premium Bonds as a savings account with a bit of fun added into the mix. You may win, you may not. But whereas your £25…

BRRRR is an acronym which stands for Buy, Renovate, Rent, Refinance and Repeat. It’s a legitimate property investment technique which aims to (i) maximise investment returns through buying a property requiring improvement, and (ii) minimise the amount of cash tied up in the deal in order to move onto the next property investment opportunity. How does BRRRR work? There are five stages to the BRRRR strategy, as follows: Buy – Acquiring the right property When using the BRRRR method, success will be dependent upon finding the right property in the right location. The most important considerations are (i) the potential…

With house prices in the UK continuing to spiral upwards, many more buyers, particularly first time buyers, are opting to take longer mortgage terms of 30/35 years. But does taking a 30 or 35 year mortgage term over a 25 year mortgage term make sense financially? There isn’t a simple yes or no answer to this question. Stating the obvious, if you get a longer term mortgage, your capital repayments are lower as you are repaying the capital over a longer time period. Interest payments are higher as (i) the outstanding capital is not paid down as fast, and (ii)…

Creating a personal financial budget is the first step you absolutely must take in your journey to financial freedom and control. It is vitally important that you have a strong understanding of both your incomings and outgoings. This allows an analysis of which areas of income and cost can be optimised (increased or decreased) to achieve your goals. In this article, we aim to set out easy to follow steps for creating your own personal financial budget, but also encourage you to think about how you can set yourself up for success in sticking to the budget you create. If…

To buy, send or receive cryptocurrency, you must setup a ‘wallet’. Once setup, only you can access your wallet. If you want to someone to send you cryptocurrency, you must send them an ‘address’ (also known as a ‘public key’). The below code is an example of a public key to receive Ethereum, which has an associated QR code. Whoever is sending you cryptocurrency will require your public key. However, each public key has a corresponding ‘private key’ which only you have access to. This is confidential and should not be shared with other parties. Similar to the public key…

If you want to add up the same cell across multiple tabs in Excel, without manually linking to the individual tabs, you can use this useful technique. First, you must include the tabs you wish to add up within two separating tabs. For example, in the above screenshot, you can see that we have added two blank tabs, named >> and <<, before and after the UK P&L and USA P&L tabs. There is nothing within these tabs – they are included purely for reference. Once the separating tabs are made, you start with the SUM function by typing =SUM(…

The trade creditor days measure essentially allows you to calculate how long it is taking a business to pay its suppliers. Comparing the average trade creditor days in the current period to the prior period average allows you to consider whether the business is paying its debts faster/slower. Of course, a change in days could also be driven by a range of other factors – see ‘what can impact trade creditor days’ section below. There are a number of ways to calculate trade creditor days, with many accountancy books often advocating the most simplistic, but not necessarily the best methodology.…