The Pension Tax changes in 2011 that will be effective from April are said to have the biggest impact on higher earners.
Robin Ellison, Tax Consultant and partner at Pinsent Masons gives his view on the pension tax changes:
“Despite the apparent limits on the amount of contributions that can be made, there are several loopholes that allow higher contributions to be made if the individual can afford it.”
The HSBC published research last week claiming that 35% per cent of people are not worried about the new tax and accounting changes, and that 39% of high-income individuals claiming that the changes will have no impact on them.
How will the Pension Tax Changes 2011 effect you?
However, as from April 6th 2011 the annual amount that can be saved into a pension that will attract tax relief will fall from £255,000 to £50,000 – that’s a big change. This is a significant reduction targeted to affect 100,000 pension savers, 80% of whom will earn more than £100,000.
Mr Ellison added that the “real tragedy” of the new tax rules was the “breaking of the community of interest of all people in pensions”. Something that seems to be a trend in recent years. The drop in the amount that can be saved into a private pension will further cause the private provision of pensions to “fall substantially”
This seems to make little sense as this may result in less rather than more money for the Treasury.
If your business has recently upgraded to a new version of Microsoft Office you may have seen a noticeable drop off in productivity from your staff.
Versions of Office up to and including 2003 all had a relatively similar layout, with dropdown menus used to access the various functions. Users had become familiar with this layout and were comfortable with where to find the commands they needed to use.
With Office 2007 and 2010 the layout of all the Office Suite of products changed drastically with the introduction of the Ribbon. Commands are now accessed using the Ribbon, rather than the dropdown menus.
Once you know how to use it the new interface may be more intuitive, however staff that aren’t familiar with the Ribbon may have trouble finding the commands they used regularly in previous versions, leading to a drop in productivity as it takes longer to write a letter, create a presentation or spreadsheet.
To get you started here is our guide to the new Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2010.
We’ll use Word 2010 to illustrate the points but the principles are the same throughout the Office Suite of products.
There are three main components to the Ribbon
1: Tabs – each Tab relates to the core tasks you do in each of the Office Programs 2: Groups – each Group contains related commands, for example all the commands for formatting text are in the ‘Font’ group. 3: Commands – the commands allow you to carry out specific tasks like changing a font size or colour. The commands are arranged in groups.
If you are in to your social media and love keeping up to date with Twitter and Facebook, then this is the browser for you! RockMelt has been created to make the web browser more complete and is based on what people are using the Internet mainly for – Social media.
Earlier today RockMelt Beta was released here and you just need to sign in with your Facebook account and wait for an email with an invitation to use RockMelt.
RockMelt Features
If you use Google Chrome then you will be able to switch over very easily as RockMelt is build on Chronium, the only differences are that there are columns running down the side of the browser. On the left side of your RockMelt browser you have your Facebook contacts and on the right you have your bookmarks. With your Facebook contacts on the left you can add your favourite contacts, share links with them, chat with them and do most of the normal things you do with Facebook without actually heading to the site.
RockMelt isn’t just a browser for Facebook, you can update both your Facebook and Twitter accounts, plus with the built in Share button, you can Tweet about various sites, videos, photos and things you find on the Internet. On the right of the browser, where your Twitter and various other bookmarks are placed, RockMelt will soon be rolling out further social media add-ons, expect YouTube, Flickr, Stumble etc. in the near future.
RockMelt is the first browser to be fully backed by the Cloud, so this allows you to access your preferences anywhere; all you have to do is log in through your Facebook account. If you use a certain website often then RockMelt will log that site and then alert you when the site has been updated.
Below is the promo video showing all of RockMelts features in action -
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Just make sure your tweet contains our Twitter name (@SBTTraining so we can track you as a contestant) and a link to this blog post (of which http://bit.ly/2sCAJh is a short version) and include the hashtag #SBTweet
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This comprehensive step-by-step guide to everyone’s favourite spreadsheet application can be taken in it’s entirety, or you can dip in to the most relevant sections to re-cap on tools that you’ve forgotten (or never knew in the first place!)
If you like this, keep your eyes on the Free Training Resources section and this blog, as we’ve got more free content on the way, including a comprehensive Dreamweaver CS4 tutorial.
If your business has recently upgraded to a new version of Microsoft Office you may have seen a noticeable drop off in productivity from your staff.
If you are in to your social media and love keeping up to date with Twitter and Facebook, then this is the browser for you! RockMelt has been created to make the web browser more complete and is based on what people are using the Internet mainly for – Social media.
