personal-finance – FIRE v London

Nov ’25: Coastal Folly loan repaid

2025-12-142025-12-14 FIRE v London1 Comment

Trump dominated the headlines again. This time partly due to some very biased editing by the BBC of a Panorama show about Trump before the US election.

There was also the omnipresent UK Budget. Which has had more than enough coverage. I did a ‘damage assessment‘ at the time and haven’t revised/updated my view since.

Back at home, the Christmas season started early. I found myself dining at two of London’s impressive skyscraper restaurants in one week.

I also managed a trip up to Oxford, where the Christmas lights were out in force.

Other London highlights included a performance of the Crucible in South London, and a dinner at George’s club in Mayfair.

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2025 Budget: Damage assessment

2025-11-30 FIRE v London4 Comments

The big news in the UK this week was the latest Budget by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

The scare story in the budget runup

All UK readers of this blog will know that the rumours and counter-rumours in the run-up to this budget exceeded anything we have seen before.

There were too many rumours in advance of the budget to catalogue properly here. But I want to highlight several key rumours:

Taxes up by 2%. For a crucial couple of weeks in November, the government was rolling the pitch to break its manifesto pledge by increasing income taxes by 2%.
National insurance on investment income, notably property rental income. This rumour felt credible to me, because it happens elsewhere – such as Ireland. However most of the commentary missed a key characteristic about NI which is that there is an Upper Earnings Limit of around £4k per month (£50k p.a., roughly) above which you only pay 2%, not 8% (or, until quite recently, 12%).
Mansion taxes. The key rumours here were that there would be a tax of 1% on ‘mansions’ above the value of £1.5m or £2m. This move would have been the most impactful for me – with over £8m in two ‘mansions’, I was facing potential £40k p.a. of an entirely new tax.
Pension changes – potentially reducing the ability to take around 25% tax-free, for instance.

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July ’25: New high watermark

2025-08-16 FIRE v LondonLeave a comment

There wasn’t a huge amount to report from July.

Politically/economically I fear the most important event in the UK was the Labour government’s failure to enact its intended welfare reforms. This leaves the government a) unable to control spending b) unable to nudge the economy towards more jobs and more growth and c) facing politically expensive tax rises later in the year. For now, this hasn’t impacted the stats or portfolio very much, but it will have more of an impact over the next few years.

Meanwhile, it was a nice pleasant summer month in the UK. I managed to get to Wimbledon for the semi finals, which was a delight. I also explored the bird sanctuary at Arne, near Poole, and other bits of Dorset. I even visited Italy, which was surprisingly good value for money.