24 the advertizer Financial Blog by Carl Melvin, Affluent Financial Planning Ltd Pension – the importance of Beneficiary Drawdown What happens to your pension fund when you die? What choices do your beneficiaries have? If you have an unspent pension fund when you die, it is important that you have planned for a stress-free transfer of money to your beneficiaries (normally a spouse and/or children). The new Pension Freedoms introduced a new option – the Beneficiary Drawdown Pension Plan (BDPP). Previously, a beneficiary would receive a lump sum from the deceased person’s pension fund and the money would be paid into the recipient’s bank account. The BDPP allows the money to be retained in a pension fund and therefore avoids income or capital gains tax while it is invested. Also, the money is free from Inheritance Tax while in the BDPP. The recipient can withdraw funds at any time (they don’t have to be at retirement age) and may receive the money free from income tax if the plan holder died before age 75. However, your pension plan needs to offer BDPP and it needs to be in place before death- you cannot add it as an option after the plan holder has died. So, what do you need to do? • Check the pension plan offers BDPP as an option (many older personal pension plans do not) and perhaps consider switching to a modern pension plan that does • Complete a nomination of death benefits form and include your beneficiaries’ details • Consider including a letter of wishes to outline what you want to happen to the fund on your death. • Let your beneficiaries know about the change. So, the key is to keep an inherited pension fund as a pension fund, so that beneficiaries have the maximum flexibility allowed under the Pension Freedoms. This information is not financial advice. If you require advice you should consult a professional adviser. The first meeting is normally free and there is no obligation. Carl Melvin is a regulated pension transfer specialist. Call us for a FREE financial review on 01505 59 50 60 or info@affluentfp.co.uk. Alternatively, pop into the Affluent office opposite Amaretto restaurant on Main Street, Bridge of Weir. www.affluentfp.co.uk IT Blog with Colin Fyfe of Colcom In April this year, a simple human typo caused a massive Amazon Cloud outage. The cost of the errant finger to the S&P 500 was reckoned to total more than $150 million. A diverse range of companies were all affected by the outage, including Nike, Netflix, Spotify, Buzzfeed, Slack and AirBnB, as well as countless IoT-connected devices that might be found throughout the home and office place. The scale of the problem is dwarfed by the recent WannaCry virus outbreak but none the less, it points to the fragility of the data that we entrust to the tech giants and the potential for a complete cloud system failure. The advice that has filtered down to IT departments in the months since the faux pas from the global leader in Cloud Technology with a knack in correctly guessing what I want to buy next week, is to back up our cloud data on another cloud. The leading three public Cloud space providers are Amazon, Microsoft and Google, with IBM also entering the fold and a host of smaller players, including Apple who in the past have used Amazon’s Cloud hardware for your snaps and tunes. These Cloud service providers all offer a vast variety competing products from simple data storage to AI computation. The scale, diversity and complexity of these must make automating a reliable backup between these providers, for active computational data, like feeding soup into a blue ray player using salad tongs. Anyway, when I heard this advice I had to giggle, as vastly complex as these cloud providers’ systems are and as safe as they tell us our data is (99.9979% uptime according to Microsoft Compute figures), there is always the universally recognised backup option to fall upon. Remember to do your own backups as often as is necessary, your data is only as safe as the paper it is printed on. t: 01505 613340 07731 923970 e: info@advertizer.co.uk
september <strong>2017</strong> 25 @<strong>Gryffe</strong>Ads www.advertizer.co.uk
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