Monthly Roundup for May 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 Many candidates aren’t aware of this, which can result in candidates studying out-of-date information.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.

A popular topic for both R03 and AF1 exams, in particular, is the transferable nil rate band. It sometimes appears in R01 and R06 too. This article will help you to understand how you would answer a question regarding inheritance tax and transferable nil rate band on your CII exam.

This article takes a closer look at a discounted gift trust and how a chargeable event on the investment bond may be taxed – of particular interest to those studying for any of the CII R03, R06, J02, AF1 or AF5 exams.

The CII R03 exam continues to be one of the hardest exams to pass at diploma level. The main complaint from candidates is the way the questions are worded and that 60 minutes is not long enough to answer 50 questions, particularly when 15 of those are multiple-response. Here we give you some strategies that will help your exam preparation.

Did you know that some therapists encourage their clients to forget their troublesome past by getting them to write in minute detail, over and over again all their complaints about it – until they forget what they’re supposed to be complaining about? Well, it’s true! The more you write, the less you remember.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how often a subject comes up in the exam manuals, it still doesn’t always help us to really understand a topic. It seems that derivatives are one of those subjects, so this article about options has been written to try and simplify things.

We’ve talked many a time about how a discretionary trust is taxed, but anyone sitting the J02, AF1 and potentially the R06 and AF5 exams will also need to know the ins and outs of how an interest in possession (IIP) trust is also taxed.

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 25 May

Friday 18 May

Friday 11 May

Friday 4 May