Tax consultancy - Pension tax changes

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.”

If you are looking for a  Tax Consultant try Knill James Chartered Accountants in Sussex. Silicon Beach Training provide HR Training and Excel Training in Brighton, Sussex UK.

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.

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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.

Get up to speed with the new versions of Office with our Office 2007 Upgrade Training and Office 2010 Upgrade Training courses, we provide training on the whole Microsoft Office Suite of products, including Excel training, Advanced Excel Training,  Access training, Advanced Access training, PowerPoint training, Outlook training and Project training courses in Brighton, Sussex.

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.

Backstage View

The Tabs, Groups and Commands in the Ribbon allow you to do things within a document, whereas the backstage view  allows you to do things to a document ( this contains commands found in the ‘File Menu’ in Office 2003 or the ‘Office Button’ in 2007).

If you click on the ‘File’ tab you will see the Backstage view.  This contains all the commands you use to manage your document such as saving, printing, creating new documents.

To exit Backstage view, click on the ‘Home’ tab or press the ‘Esc’ key on the keyboard and you will be taken back to your document.

Hide & Show the Ribbon

You can click the small arrow in the top right of the screen to hide the Ribbon.  This will give you more space to work on your document.  Pressing ‘CTRL+F1′ on the keyboard also hides the Ribbon.

Quick Access Toolbar

The Quick Access Toolbar is always shown whether the Ribbon is hidden or not.  The standard commands here are the most commonly used ones such as ‘Save’, ‘Undo’ and ‘Redo’.  You can also ad your own custom commands to the Quick Access Toolbar.

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Did you know Silicon Beach Training offer great Social Media Training, in Brighton, Sussex, as well as that we also offer other training courses, such as – Excel Training, PRINCE2 Training and Assertiveness Training.

Do you want to try out the New RockMelt Browser?

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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win free training

You could enter our current photo competition though – click here

Want a free place on one of our public training courses? Fancy something creative for example our Photoshop Training Course in Brighton, Sussex, or  Dreamweaver Training, something practical like Time Management Training or brush up on  something more technical like VBA for Excel Training. A full list of public courses can be found on our training dates page (only courses with a maximum duration of two days can be claimed as your prize)

Enter our simple retweet competition on Twitter to be in with a chance!

It’s Really Easy to Enter

The only thing you have to do is -

1) Follow @SBTTraining

2) Retweet our competition invite on twitter.

RT: Win Free Training – @SBTTraining is giving it away! Visit http://bit.ly/2sCAJh for more info! #SBTweet
(click on this for an easy retweet)

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

We will DM the winner so make sure you follow us @SBTTraining.

That’s all you have to do. See? Entering is very easy!

Don’t have a Twitter Account?

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service. It allows you to send short messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.” You can find more information about Twitter (and how it works) here.

Signing up is very easy and only takes a few seconds.

How do we decide the Winner?

On Monday 13th December 2010 at 12.00 GMT we will randomly select one winner from everybody who sent a Tweet according to the guidelines above.

We will announce the winner via Twitter the same day (so we highly suggest you follow us) and will contact the winner through DM . The winner will be able to select any of our public scheduled courses based in Brighton up to 2-days in length.

The winner will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation costs.

What’s the Catch?

There is no catch. We’re not after your email address or phone number.

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5. 20% Discount for Twitter Followers

Stop press! We’ve made another new addition to our Free Training Resources section – a complete beginners tutorial for Excel 2007.

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.

Make sure you follow us on Twitter to keep abreast of the latest updates!

We also offer comprehensive Beginners Excel Training,  Advanced Excel Courses in Brighton, Sussex, for those who prefer to do their learning hands-on and VBA for Excel Training for the really techie people.

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