This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘How “painful” will the Budget be for your finances?’
Keir Starmer voice clip
I said change would not happen overnight. When there’s a deep rot at the heart of a structure you have to overhaul the entire thing, even if it’s harder work and takes more time.
Claer Barrett
Britain is braced for big tax changes. The Labour government is going to raise taxes at the Budget on the 30th of October. This much we know. Changes to income tax, national insurance and VAT have been ruled out. But what we don’t yet know is which other taxes could rise or which valuable tax reliefs could be lost. The prime minister has warned it’s going to be painful and frankly, there’s lots for investors to be worried about.
However, my guest today sees this as a once in a generation opportunity to reform the UK tax system and make it fairer, less complex and more likely to achieve the government’s number one goal of boosting economic growth. So if he was in the chancellor’s shoes, what might he do?
Dan Neidle
Tax complexity isn’t just something that annoys the tax nerds, in fact, tax nerds get paid more when we have tax complexity. Tax complexity is bad for the good people and good for the bad people.
Claer Barrett
Welcome to Money Clinic, the weekly podcast about personal finance and investing from the Financial Times. I’m Claer Barrett, the FT’s consumer editor.
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Joining me this week is Dan Neidle, who I would describe as the goat of tax experts, the greatest of all time. He cut his teeth at international law firm Clifford Chance, where he was the head of tax and left the world of corporate law two years ago to found Tax Policy Associates, an independent think-tank. Dan has made a name for himself in the media and on social media, not just for exposing tax scandals, but for his ability to make tax interesting. He’s a member of the Labour party, though he’s been very critical of Labour tax policy in the past. So I’m intrigued to hear his predictions and ideas ahead of the forthcoming Budget. Well, joining me down the line from Norfolk, please welcome Dan Neidle.
Dan Neidle
Great to be on the show.
Claer Barrett
Well, thanks for joining us. Now, before we get stuck into the Budget, I’d like to kick off on a topic that I know bothers you, which is how little most people know about tax and how the tax system works. I mean, you’ve got the chance to pitch. Why is tax important and what do you think some of the most common misconceptions that people have?
Dan Neidle
So there’s always lots of fuss in the United States for people going up a tax bracket. You hear people saying, well, I don’t want to take this promotion, I I don’t want to do this job. Otherwise I’m going to go up a tax bracket because there’s a belief, a folk myth, if you like, that if you go up a tax bracket by one cent, then all of your income is taxed at a higher rate. Of course, that’s not how it works. And there have been many opinion polls and studies done in the States to work out exactly how many people believe this myth, and it’s got half of the US population. And we tend to look at that here and snigg*r and go, they are stupid Americans. It wouldn’t be anything like that here. No one’s tested it, so we tested it.
We, with the very kind assistance of WeThink, they gave us a free question, a couple of free questions in their opinion polling. And we found that just like the States, apparently half of the British public thinks that if you earn a penny more and that takes you into our higher tax band, then all of your income is subject to tax with a higher rate. So people don’t understand one of the most basic things about income tax. And most of the time that doesn’t matter. Most people are employees. Most people are paid on PAYE. They don’t really need to know how the tax system works. But unfortunately, when that becomes mixed with lots of opinion polls asking people’s view on tax and that becomes mixed with policy and politicians and elections, you can end up with tax policy, which is highly populist and appears to be popular but is amazingly ineffective at driving growth. And that, I’m afraid, is where we are now.
Claer Barrett
Lots of people think that we should be taught in school about how the tax system works. Do you agree with that and what do you think are the most important lessons?
Dan Neidle
I really don’t want to make teachers’ lives more complicated. I think if we’re right that half the country misunderstands the tax system, if that has real effects, like people really do turn down promotions because they think it will cost them money, then something needs to be done. That thing is not in schools. That . . . we wouldn’t see the benefit of that for 20, 30 years. There needs to be a public education programme now. But I’m hesitant to be saying that should definitely happen because I can’t swear the problem is real. We just have one opinion poll. And if it is real, I can’t swear it’d have real-world consequences. But I would say I think this is something that needs to be looked at.
Claer Barrett
Nevertheless, the focus in politics and in the media at the moment is very much focused on tax and what tax-raising options that Chancellor Rachel Reeves might consider in her first Budget on the 30th of October.
Dan Neidle
Oh god and I hate that focus so much. It’s always the focus. Tax is always about revenue-raising or about tax cuts. And that’s kind of why we’ve ended up with a tax system that’s a mishmash of unprincipled, ancient rules and why in many ways it holds back growth. You said at the start I thought this was an opportunity for tax reform. And I do think that. But that means looking at tax as more than just tax-raising.
Claer Barrett
What would you like to see Rachel Reeves consider in this first Budget? There’s lots of worried FT readers and Money Clinic listeners who have investments, for example, and pensions, who are fearful about the painful times to come they’ve been warned of. But looking at the bigger picture, what do you think could be possible?
Dan Neidle
As you say, it is the bigger picture because this is a £1tn total government spending bill. And of that trillion pounds, we’re now told Rachel Reeves is trying to find 22bn of additional taxes. It’s nothing. So the reforms I have looked at are much bigger. I won’t go through them in detail because we’ll be here for three days. But how about an end to crazy marginal tax rate to over 60 per cent. It’s a disgrace. I’d end charging the poor extortionate penalties when they accidentally don’t get the tax return in no time, particularly when they’re so poor they don’t have enough to pay tax.
I would abolish stamp duty on land because it’s preposterous and it holds back growth. I’d abolish council tax because it’s incredibly unfair and applies disproportionately to the poor and barely to the rich. I’d abolish business rates because they’re terrible for, in particular, retail businesses. I’d replace all of those property taxes with a land tax that would actually act as an engine for growth. Of course, I could keep going forever.
I would end the tax system bias against employment. I would end employee national insurance, which, to be fair, Jeremy Hunt seemed to be trying to do. I would try and find a way to end employers’ national insurance, and that’s quite hard. I’d reform inheritance tax. I’d cut the VAT threshold. I’d extend full expensing so that all investment by companies was tax deductible. I’d probably, as a quid pro quo to that, I’d stop interest being deductible. I’d change environmental tax reform for capital gains tax. How about an end to crazy marginal tax rate to over 60 per cent is a disgrace.
Claer Barrett
This affects a lot of people I know who listen to the podcast. You go into six-figure salary territory earning more than £100,000. And that’s the point where the tax-free personal allowance, that first 12 and a half thousand pounds there or thereabouts that you are allowed to earn tax-free, that starts to be clawed back, leaving you paying the equivalent of 60 per cent income tax on that salary band between 100 and 125k.
Dan Neidle
Any of these things could be looked at by a reforming government. I believe they would all drive growth. They might even raise a bit of revenue. But the main game should be growth. One per cent on GDP is worth way more than nicking around with pension tax here or there.
Claer Barrett
Well we’re going to discuss some of those on the show in more detail. But let’s stick with pensions first off. One of the ideas that the government are reportedly looking at is introducing a single flat rate of pensions tax relief. So there’s no advantage for higher or additional rate taxpayers. How could that change investor behaviour?
Dan Neidle
You could raise, I think, as much as £15bn if you went for an absolute limit of 20 per cent on pension tax relief, but there’s complications. One complication is the whole deal with pensions is you get tax relief in and then you’re taxed when you take the income out. And if you’re saying to someone who’s on the higher rate, we’re gonna only give you 20 per cent tax relief in, but we’re still gonna tax you at 40 per cent on the way out. I think many people looking at that will say, yeah, that’s not much of a deal, and they won’t put money in pensions. That will have a whole bunch of secondary and tertiary effects that are probably way beyond my expertise. But people respond to tax changes, and I certainly think they’d respond to this one.
Claer Barrett
If we ask the question, though, what are pensions for? I think most people would come up with a definition of, you know, saving and building up investments to draw on when we stop working. However, if you were to ask a wealth manager this question, they really have become an inheritance planning tool for the wealthy because of the favourable tax treatment pensions have when people die. Now, do you think that is an area that Rachel Reeves could be tempted to reform?
Dan Neidle
I do. It’s kind of super weird that if you die before you’re 75, then your spouse, your children, whoever can inherit the pension free of inheritance tax and in fact no tax at all on the income on the way out. Now, if you’re 75 or older, then they are taxed with PAYE basis. So it could be up to 40 per cent if they’re getting large enough payments from it. Under 75, they’re not. What’s the rationale for this? Why should pensions get an inheritance tax benefit? I don’t see the case for it.
Claer Barrett
I mean, it does rather stick out as an anomaly. Now, we’ve talked about pensions, but an awful lot of our listeners are also using Isas, individual savings accounts, to give them their full term. But stocks and shares Isas, what our listeners prefer, they’re using those as a vehicle to save for their future retirement. And a very nice little tax bump they’ll get from it too. What do you think the future could be for the Isa regime?
Dan Neidle
So Isas are a lot less significant than pensions in terms of the cost to the exchequer. They cost about 7bn every year in terms of lost tax and income and gains. Most taxes are pretty small, only 20 per cent of more than £50,000. I think that 20 per cent with more than 50 grand in takes about 80 per cent of the benefit. So in principle, the government could raise £5bn by capping Isa relief for the first £50,000. You could do that. But it’s kind of unfair. People have been encouraged to save into Isas for years. Many people who have Isas, it’s been decades in which they’ve been faithfully putting money in on the promise of tax exemption.
To then change the rules after the event, that feels wrong to me. It feels different from, say, change the rate of capital gains because people bought an asset. They would have bought it anyway. Here, people have actively planned, spent time thinking, changed the way that they run their finances, maybe changed some of the ways they live their life in order to take advantage of these schemes. To change that after the event. I wouldn’t do that.
Claer Barrett
We could make the precise same argument about pensions. I mean, I’ve been making the biggest payments I can afford to into my pension fund because I only started my pension at the age of 30. So I’ve been playing catch-up. If, as you say, people like me who haven’t been spending that money, they’ve responsibly been putting it aside for the future, all of a sudden find out that those advantages are not going to be there when they finally get to the point where they can hang up their quills, then, understandably, there’s going to be huge anger at Labour for this destroying of faith in the pension system.
Dan Neidle
That depends on what they do. If they scrapped the 25 per cent tax-free allowance . . .
Claer Barrett
That’s a 25 per cent lump sum that you can get tax-free, up to around a quarter of £1mn when you start taking your pension.
Dan Neidle
Yeah, I think if Labour scrapped the 25 per cent lump sum rule, so someone who’d planned on getting that lump sum for years now couldn’t, that would be widely seen as unfair. And again, I’d be sympathetic to that. Similarly, if Labour radically changed the tax position for the income that you draw down for a pension, that feels unfair to me.
If on the other hand Labour are changing the tax relief rules going in, that seems different. That’s not affecting the money you’ve put in up to now. And if Labour charged income coming out from the pension with national insurance, yes, that’s a change. It’s not a huge one. It feels a kind of fair one giving you relief from the way in. I don’t think you can grumble too much. So there are shades of grey here.
Claer Barrett
But you feel that as we’ve seen with the anger over the Winter Fuel Payment being taken away from wealthier pensioners, if you make changes to people who feel like something is their entitlement, then there are political consequences as well as tax ones.
Dan Neidle
Yeah. And that’s one of the problems with tax policy. That the people who benefit, normally benefit by quite a small amount or very indirectly, and that they’re not rampaging in the streets screaming with pleasure at how happy they are. The people who lose out feel it’s outrageous. The Winter Fuel Payment Scheme, after all, has been here for 300 years. Maybe it was in Magna Carta. How outrageous that people who don’t need it can’t get it any more. So yes, I’m a little bit unsympathetic to that, but I’m in the lucky position of not having to get any votes from anyone.
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Claer Barrett
Now Martin Lewis, the money-saving expert, he has been campaigning for years for the government to rebrand student loans as a graduate tax so that people understand the method of paying back a 9 per cent slice of your income above a certain level. And then after 40 years, that loan obligation being wiped. Do you think that this is a very misunderstood area of our tax system?
Dan Neidle
Totally, and it’s deliberate. Why is it a loan and not a tax? Because it meant that Labour could increase funding in higher education without raising taxes. I think there were EU law issues as well, that if you had a tax, the UK wouldn’t have been able to collect it from people who came here from the EU and then left the UK. So there were some technical reasons why it was alone, which don’t really apply any more, but a lot of it was PR-driven.
Why did we have national insurance increase after national insurance increase instead of income tax increases? Because there’s a widespread public misunderstanding that national insurance isn’t a tax. It’s some kind of personal savings account locked away in Whitehall somewhere. There’s a little piggy bank with your name on and the money in. Of course, it doesn’t work like that.
Claer Barrett
Yeah, and it is a form of income tax. National insurance.
Dan Neidle
It is tax on income albeit a stupid tax on income because it doesn’t apply to savings and investment income. It doesn’t apply to rents. It doesn’t apply to the retired. So it’s a dumb income tax. But it’s absolutely an income tax. And the student loan, absolutely a graduate tax, albeit a stupid graduate tax which can result in high rates of 60, 70, even if you’re lucky enough, 80 per cent for some people. So yes, not a fan of the student loans. Will politicians admit its true nature? No chance.
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Claer Barrett
Now another area that the chancellor’s hotly rumoured to be looking at is increasing rates of capital gains tax on investments. Dan, what could the economic consequences be here?
Dan Neidle
Capital gains tax is a tricky tax because you choose when you pay it. If I’m earning £50,000 a year then I’m earning £50,000 a year. There’s nothing I can do to change that. But if I have £50,000 of shares, I could sell them today. Maybe I’ll have a capital gain, I could wait. I could sell them tomorrow. And so if I think that the rate of capital gains is about to go up significantly, I’m going to sell them today, unlocking that gain. If I have something which is harder to sell, like some real estate investments and the rate is about to go up, I probably can’t sell in time to beat that rate. But what I can certainly do is hold off on selling when the new rate is in place, thinking, hoping, praying that the rate is going to drop at some point in the future.
So revenues from capital gains tax are extremely sensitive to the rate. We’ve seen that in the past, every change there’s been, the capital gains tax rate, all of those, there’s been very significant swings in the revenues from the tax. So one of the lessons from that, the first lesson is if you’re going to raise capital gains tax, don’t tell anyone about it until the moment it happens. Quite often politicians do. The second lesson is that if you’re making more than small changes, you risk losing money. We saw this in the election. The Lib Dems and the Greens thought they were going to raise billions and billions of pounds for equalising the capital gains tax rate with the income tax rate. HMRC figures say if you do that, we’d actually lose £3bn.
Claer Barrett
Because nobody would sell.
Dan Neidle
Yes. I think the IFS think the HMRC figures are a bit too pessimistic there, but the principle is nevertheless good. But this doesn’t mean we should give up on increasing rates. It means that an increase in the rate is of itself, I think, not a good policy. A broader reform where, for example, you give inflation relief, so as we used to have. So you’re not taxed on just pure inflationary gains and at the same time increase the rate somewhat, that could be a rational policy.
Claer Barrett
Certainly, the latest data that we can see from HMRC is that wealthy people have been selling shares and other investments thinking, well, we’ll pay the tax now at 20 per cent rather than wait and potentially pay at a higher rate, wait for 30 days, can buy that same shares.
Dan Neidle
And if I was Rachel Reeves and I didn’t want to raise capital gains tax, I’d want everyone to think that I was going to. So I got a little capital gains bonanza. Awesome.
Claer Barrett
Well, exactly. And that seems to be what’s happening.
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Now, you mentioned at the top of the show that if you were in the chancellor’s shoes and you were making big reforms, ideally, you would like to scrap various taxes. Now, some of the ones you mentioned, national insurance, council tax, stamp duty, give us your rationale for why you would end them and what you would replace them with.
Dan Neidle
Actually, let’s start with what I didn’t mention, but it’s probably quite interesting to your listeners: stamp duty on shares. So we have 0.5 per cent stamp duty on the purchase of shares, not a purchase by a hedge fund or Goldman Sachs’ proprietary trading desk. They’re exempt. It’s you and me and our pension funds and unit trusts that pay stamp duty. So it’s a tax on investors. It’s one of the highest rates in the developed world. I think only Ireland has a higher rate. And their domestic market isn’t that important to Irish investors. So practically (inaudible). So it’s a high rate. It applies to all shares not just the biggest companies. No other developed country does that.
And there’s reasonably good evidence suggesting that if we abolish stamp duty on shares, that would reduce the cost of capital for the companies, it would result in an immediate capital gain for current shareholders. And those two factors would actually increase tax revenues net. Now it’s, in political terms, maybe it’s not a good look, abolishing stamp duty on shares as a giveaway to investors. Maybe Labour can do it. Maybe it’s a Nixon goes to China thing, that only the Labour party can abolish stamp duty on shares. But I hope they think about it.
Claer Barrett
And would you also advocate scrapping stamp duty on property? I mean that’s a cost of buying a property that lots of first-time buyers frankly don’t factor in.
Dan Neidle
I mean, stamp duty on property, it was always a bad tax, and it’s been used as a tap by successive chancellors because it’s so easy to increase the rate. You now end up with an effective marginal rate of over 10 per cent the large house purchases. And this has real implications. Yes, it makes it harder for people to get on the housing ladder. It deters people from switching properties when they otherwise would.
Claer Barrett
And from downsizing.
Dan Neidle
Yeah, it stops them downsizing. It deters people from moving to a house of equivalent value because you’ll just be throwing stamp duty away. And that has labour market mobility problems. It’s a tax that shouldn’t exist. Transaction tax is generally a bad tax, because if you tax up, you get less of it. And we don’t want fewer share transactions or fewer land transactions. And I think there’s almost unanimity among tax policy people and tax economists that stamp duty on land is a bad tax issue.
Claer Barrett
However, the idea of a land tax you would support. Now explain to listeners exactly what this is and how it would work.
Dan Neidle
So if we just scrapped stamp duty on land, there would be a sudden jump in land values reflecting that. It wouldn’t actually be that good for buyers. It would also mean that the government lost something like 10bn tax revenue. So I don’t think that’s either a desirable or realistic outcome. What I’d do, scrap council tax and business rates as well. Replace them with a land value tax. That’s an annual tax based on the undeveloped value of land. So if you buy an empty plot of land, it’s land value tax on it. If you build a 50-storey skyscraper on that, then it doesn’t increase your tax liability. So unlike existing taxes on land, there is no disincentive on development. In fact, there’s a positive incentive to develop land because that makes the tax less significant compared to the economic value of what you own.
Claer Barrett
Well, certainly it’s an idea that is gaining traction in many horses.
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What are the distorting behaviours are tax rules causing within the UK economy?
Dan Neidle
Pick a tax and we will find complexities, uncertainties, design defects. That is a problem for good people because it makes it harder to comply and pay the tax they’re owed. It often creates bad results for good people who are trying to be compliant. But when we have those uncertainties, complexities, it creates fantastic opportunities for bad actors. They will avoid tax. They will evade tax, you know, that they couldn’t do if the rules were simpler. Tax complexity isn’t just something that annoys the tax nerds. In fact, tax nerds get paid more when we have tax complexity. Tax complexity is bad for the good people and good for the bad people.
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Claer Barrett
Now, the way that people are taxed if they’re employed as a contractor, this is something that affects many people who work in the IT industry, the construction industry and hospitality, some big sectors that you work via an umbrella company, you get taxed in a very complicated way. What you thought of was your day rate is shredded down bit by bit to a much lower payment and with much fewer employment rights. Now, what do you think about that side of the tax system?
Dan Neidle
The original sin here is that we tax employment income more than other types of income. So if you receive dividends, you are taxed at 39.35 per cent top rate. If you receive employment income, your top income tax rate is 45 per cent. And then of course 2 per cent national insurance on that. But then what you haven’t seen is that the employer is left 13.8 per cent national insurance contribution to make on their overall pay packet. Now, those are very powerful incentives that make people structure arrangements so that they claim it’s not employment. And so it would be very weird if there weren’t a series of rules to stop people doing that.
The problem is that once you have those rules, they rely on entirely arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. And yet again, those lines are easily manipulated by bad people, but very hard to navigate for good people. And the answer isn’t to change the rules slightly, because there’s still going to have a line and there’s still going to be problems over where the line is. The only way to solve it is to remove the line and eliminate the tax difference between employment and self-employment. That is super hard but the government really should be thinking about how to do it. Might be a 10-year project, but it’s worth doing because there’s a prize here. Because again, if we have a tax on employment, we get less employment and employment is a good thing. We want more of it.
Claer Barrett
Now, the proposed clampdown on tax evasion in the Labour party manifesto, that’s being relied upon to raise a huge amount of money by the new government. Do you think it could work?
Dan Neidle
Yes. There is a tax gap of about 30bn. I think a lot of people believe that is evil millionaires in volcanoes or in tropical islands evading tax. It isn’t. Most taxable (inaudible) tax evasion is small businesses. It’s men in white vans being paid in cash. It’s dirty schemes being flogged as small businesses by bad people. One-third of corporation tax that should be paid by small businesses isn’t paid. So the politicians need to be honest here and not pretend that this is money that could be magically collected from evil billionaires. This is money that will end up being collected from fairly normal people. But if you’re serious about the rule of law, you’re serious about a fair tax system, then everyone should pay the taxes legally due. So I think there is a clear moral as well as a financial argument for doing a better job of collecting it. Can you collect another 5bn out of that 30bn tax gap? I think you can, but it has to be done with real vision and not just by throwing money at HMRC, sitting back and hoping they do a better job.
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Claer Barrett
If you weren’t constrained by the chancellor’s manifesto commitments — just to remind listeners that’s not to make changes to income tax, national insurance, VAT or corporation tax that businesses pay — what would you do then?
Dan Neidle
I’m dictator for a day or a week or a year. What would I do?
Claer Barrett
As long as you like.
Dan Neidle
I won’t bore listeners with my personal political views. I would like some honesty among politicians. If we want to have continental public services, we need to have constant level of taxes on ordinary people. That’s a possible thing I’d do. The second thing I do around corporation tax is I would abolish the current distinction on the kind of expenses you get a tax deduction for and the kind that you don’t. So the full expensing that was created a couple of years ago is not that full expensive. It’s semi-full expensive.
Claer Barrett
The so-called super deduction.
Dan Neidle
Yes, the super deduction isn’t super enough. Companies buying a factory, building machinery, they should get upfront tax relief for every penny that they spend. And that would simplify things. It would remove a source of complexity, avoidance and evasion. And it would act as a boost to growth, some people have set up to 1 per cent in GDP. Rules cost a lot of money. How do you pay for that? One of two ways. One is by raising a rate of corporation tax. The other is by ending or severely restricting tax deductibility of interest. That’s quite a dramatic change. It probably wouldn’t be very popular, but I think it would be right.
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Claer Barrett
OK. Final question. It wasn’t all that long ago when Rachel Reeves promised that she wouldn’t bring in so-called wealth taxes. Now, comments in recent days have reignited fears that something more specific could be planned to target the wealthiest in society. Dan, how likely do you think that would be? Is it just hysteria that’s being whipped up by Fleet Street, or is there a real temptation there for the chancellor to try and fill that black hole?
Dan Neidle
So almost all the tax proposals we see for wealth tax are from lobby groups, NGOs. And it’s political showboating. They’re not serious proposals. So the other day there was a lot of noise from, I think, the Tax Justice Network saying the Spanish wealth tax was fantastic. Every country should adopt it. That would raise $2tn worldwide. If you step back and actually look at the Spanish wealth tax, which is one of these fashionable taxes that only applies to very wealthy people, how much money did it raise last year? The answer is €660mn — 0.05 per cent of Spanish GDP. It’s an irrelevance.
So you’ve had all the downsides for tax, which has prompted some people to leave Spain, people to rearrange their businesses to minimise their liability, and for what? A truly piddly amount of tax. And that’s not a surprise, because historically, wealth taxes have failed in almost every country in which they’ve been tried. They’ve raised derisory amounts and have had adverse effects. So I don’t think amongst serious policymakers ongoing wealth taxes are seen as a solution. It’s notable that the Wealth Tax Commission produced an incredibly detailed report on the wealth tax, which I ended up recommending against an annual wealth tax because of these problems.
They instead suggested something quite interesting, which is a one-off retrospective wealth tax, which, because it’s retrospective, can’t be avoided and doesn’t change incentives, but I think is something that politically is really difficult and maybe impossible. And so I don’t think Rachel Reeves was giving away very much when she said she wasn’t in favour of wealth taxes.
Claer Barrett
Well, Dan Neidle, thank you so much for joining us on Money Clinic today. I’ve learned so much from chatting to you.
Dan Neidle
My pleasure.
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Claer Barrett
That’s it for Money Clinic this week with me, Claer Barrett. And we hope you found this episode useful. If you did, spread the word and leave us a review. We’re always looking to chat with people about their money issues for the show, so if you’re interested in being part of a future episode and want some expert money advice, then email us: money@ft.com. You can also follow me on Instagram and TikTok. I’m @ClaerB. Money Clinic was produced by Tamara Kormornick with help from Mischa Frankl-Duval. Sound design was by Breen Turner and our editor this week was Manuela Saragosa. You heard original tunes by Metaphor Music. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. And finally, our usual disclaimer. The Money Clinic podcast is a general discussion around financial topics and does not constitute an investment recommendation or individual financial advice. For that, you’ll need to find an independent financial adviser. That’s all the small print for now. See you back here next week. Goodbye.
