**AWOOGA!** 

Pre-Update announcement! State of the Advice Nation Wave 7 is live and craves! thirsts! hungers! yearns! for your participation. Whether you are an owner, a planner, a paraplanner, a compliance person or an admin in an advice business, this is the chance to get your voice heard on the real issues in what I’m 94.7% convinced is the UK’s biggest fully independent advice research study. Please can you lend us your thoughts here; we will do nice things in return.  

**NORMAL SERVICE NOW RESUMES** 

It is a – some would say well deserved – lesson in humility that the week I return to the Update seat after Gallivanting I clash directly with the Budget, and that means no-one will read this. It was of course Socrates or maybe Plato or someone, doesn’t matter really, that said “the unexamined life is not worth living” and that poses the question of whether the unexamined Update is worth writing. I suspect the answer is ‘probably not’ but here I go anyway. It’s what I do on Wednesdays. 

There is a giddy sense of freedom and possibility when writing something no-one will read. I could write the whole thing in trochaic tetrameter, and you’d be none the wiser. Lord, what fools these mortals be, etc. Or I could do a tight 700 on the vagaries of gain-staging in front of a tube amp at the edge of break-up and the desirability of putting compression in the effects loop rather than at the start of the signal chain (opinion is divided). The world is quite literally my mollusc. When nothing you do matters, you can do anything. 

But of course I won’t, because that’s not how it works. What I will do, though, is avoid the reflexive naysaying about the Budget you’ll all be watching this afternoon, and just observe a few brief things. In so doing I am inspired by this post from the wise and brilliant Jenny Ellis at Wellington Wealth (further Ellises may crop up in the links below).  

• If you’re sad or your clients are sad about CGT, remember it’s paid by 0.65% of the population each year, and generally not folk dwelling on the breadline. I’ve heard enough planners say CGT and IHT are ‘optional’ taxes to stress the value of All The Planning, so I guess it’s nothing to worry about, right? Cheer up! It’ll all work out. 

• More broadly, as a society don’t we value the act of work more than we value living off the spoils of accumulated wealth (for those pre-retirement at least)? Do we prefer the doctor, the teacher, the solicitor and the businesswoman who sets up her own enterprise or, just as an example, someone who lives off a stake in a multinational IT business started by their dad? If it’s the former, then it isn’t complete moonbeams to suggest we could create a tax system that looks like it. So cheer up! It’ll all work out. 

• If you’re sad about employer NI, remember that an extra 2% on payroll isn’t usually the difference between a business (especially in the professional services industry) succeeding or not, and concentrate on the fact that if businesses recoup the 2% by damping down pay rises in 2025, that might keep inflation and therefore interest rates a bit lower. And given most employers and indeed employees also have mortgages, cheer up! It’ll all work out. 

• If you’re sad about pension changes or the prospect of them, don’t worry! You’ve schooled your clients forever that you work the plan, not the tax subsidy. You never let the tax tail wag the planning dog. All that’s happening is one change to one small input of the plan, and you can do that in about 4 minutes with all the software that does the red and green bars and that, and probably charge a fee for it too. Cheer up! It’ll all work out. 

Broadly, cheer up. It’ll all work out. I’ve got a French pal staying at the moment and he showed me what tax rates are like for employers in particular over there. We don’t need to do the detail but let’s just say this: it could be worse. 

And your music choice this week is a treat for the hundreds of you who’ve clamoured for more Portuguese black metal. Please enjoy the strangely beautiful Suspended by Gaerea, which I guess might or might not be their paean to the ancient Japanese art of shibari; it’s quite hard to hear the lyrics. Anyway, it’s a tremendous piece of music and features one of surprisingly few videos to document the aftermath of an explosion in a yoghurt factory. I’m hoping that’s what it is, anyway.