Monthly Roundup for April 2018

Here’s your Monthly Roundup of Brand Financial Training’s Blog posts.

We share this with you each month, because we understand you're busy people and we want to ensure you don’t miss out on any useful information that will help you with your CII exams. This Monthly Roundup allows you to see, at a glance, what articles have been posted and you can simply click on any that are of interest to you.

Are you aware that the CII update their study texts throughout the examinable year to either incorporate new legislations, correct errors or clarify information? Many candidates aren’t aware of this, which can result in candidates studying out-of-date information. To make this easier for you, we have collated the most recent CII study text updates. As some of them affect Brand Financial Training’s learning resources, we have also updated the relevant parts of our resources, which are noted below. Note that we always keep our resources up-to-date.

It looks like the 0% saving rate might be a consideration in the recent AF5 fact-find, so we thought we would just refresh our memories on what this is. In reality, advisers are unlikely to come across it that often as it will apply to very few people, but in the exam world it could easily come up in CF1, R03, R06, AF1 as well as AF5.

The following advises readers what a discounted gift trust is and provides an example that illustrates how it is used for tax planning – of particular interest to those studying for any of the CII R03, R06, J02, AF1, AF4 or AF5 exams.

A customer requested that we discuss relevant property trusts and the type of question that could come up in an exam. This will be of interest to those revising for the CII AF1 exam.

Who likes to use highlighters to identify themes in their textbooks? You? Are you sure it’s a good idea? Here, we show you how using your highlighter with wild abandon can reduce the effectiveness of your exam revision, plus we share with you the right way to use highlighters.

Inheritance tax is based on domicile status. There’s no strict definition of domicile, but it’s taken to be where you consider your permanent home to be. If you’re a UK domicile, then you’ll pay IHT on your worldwide assets, and if you’re not, then just your UK assets will be caught in the IHT net. This article provides an explanation and example of how domicile status affects IHT liability when a transfer occurs between spouses/civil partners.

This is a bit of Friday Fun where we provide you with 5 questions (and answers) relevant to a mix of CII exams. The challenge is for you to answer them in 5 minutes. We post them on the blog every Friday.

To try your 'hand' at answering the questions, visit our blog at one (or all) of the links below:

Friday 27 April

Friday 20 April

Friday 13 April

Friday 6 April