Most Mail and Sun readers, the headlines of which have been screaming ‘greed’ at BA’s pilots on £150k a year, don’t begrudge footballers their salaries of £150k per week. Doctors who reduce their hours to avoid huge tax bills on their pensions are called selfish; yet the boss of, for instance, Severn Trent earns £2m a year. I’d bet that, if your plane’s in turbulence over the alps or you need your appendix out pretty quick, you’d pay them whatever they want and wouldn’t want Ronaldo flying the plane or wielding the scalpel.
“Record year for annuity sales driven by advisers”
I was asked this week whether annuities are now ‘a good investment’. They’ve been recommended very rarely in recent years, since ‘pension freedoms’ allowed pretty much unlimited drawdown on pension funds and anything left to be passed on to beneficiaries free of Inheritance Tax.