Monthly Archives: December 2012

The Morning Show Personal Finance with Karl Deeter, Wednesday, 19 December 2012

Europe is still a mess…

I know that we are all still reeling from the budget, but we don’t exist in a bubble, how are other countries doing at the moment? According to the OECD they world economy will make a ‘hesitant and uneven recovery over the next two years’, they reckon that Europe will remain in recession until early 2013 with anaemic growth at best next year before moving towards a higher (but still deplorable) growth of 1.4% in 2014.

Debt Settlement Agreements may be more popular than insolvencies

We are often dealing with people who have problems with banks and in the past we used to try to reason with the lenders and often our clients would be told ‘no’ to what we thought were reasonable and realistic plans.

Some thoughts on budget 2013 and why it’s so sneaky

The expression ‘at least Dick Turpin wore a mask’ is used to describe the times somebody robs you blind right to your face. This week I’m sure almost every person in the country could identify with that statement as they watched the twin forces of Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin unleash cuts that hurt just about everybody, at least they didn’t discriminate. A few weeks ago I wrote about the way that politicians will hammer regular people always and without fail, a few of you wrote back saying it didn’t have to be like that, and my response was (and is) that it remains the fastest and easiest road to take, which is why people of every political ideology end up doing it.

Ireland and US to sign a Disclosure Agreement

The US Government is entering into agreements with other countries in an effort to gather more information on the financial affairs of US persons around the world. The ultimate aim is to collect more tax from them. Ireland and the US are due to sign such an agreement before the year-end.

TV3 Morning Show, property tax

On TV3 today we talked about property tax, how it is collected, what it means and some of the things to be aware of (such as not paying!)

Bludget 2013

The term ‘bludget’ is from a garbled sentence made by Marian Finucane when she went to say ‘budget’. That’s the fact of the term, what I prefer to think of it as (and in my head I rule supreme) is as a mash up of ‘bludgeon’ and ‘budget’ because it tends to be a good combination of the two, a budget with a financial beating thrown in. The budget will become virtually all of the financial news this week, the big changes for most of us will be the new property tax, and then dealing with whatever stealth method that is used to make us less well off while not ‘raising tax’. This charade is old and well versed, for instance, a few years ago the tax rates weren’t raised but the bands were lowered meaning you would start to pay the higher rate of tax earlier, that higher rate of tax now kicks in at €32,800 while the average industrial wage is about €35,000. So if you are ‘just average’ in earnings, for about 10% of that you are ‘above average’ in terms of the tax rate you’ll pay, which is where the rate more than doubles from 20% to 41%.

Is the blackmarket or taxation to blame for the upsurge in cigarette smuggling?

It was once thought that the black market was a big city problem and restricted to the kind of activities you see on the show Love/Hate, but now we are told that in Waterford city that 45% of all cigarettes consumed are illegal imports (smuggled and non-taxed). The Fine Gael TD Damien English made a […]

If you like it but you haven’t put a ring on it

I give advice to couples regularly, those couples can be married, same sex, co-habiting or otherwise, but the common thread is that they are together and plan to stay together, and they want to make financial plans with common future for themselves. The issue can be that they are not married, in Ireland as many as one in ten people are co-habiting, which takes in people who are engaged but not married, couples who live together straight and gay alike who are not married, and separated people who form new relationships but are not yet divorced. While their love may be true, their treatment in the system is not the same as married people, it can also mean a lack of rights to the property of the other person, something which is legislated for if you are married or in a civil partnership.