Monthly Roundup for October 2017

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.

This article is helpful to those studying for their CII AF1, AF3, AF5, R04, R06 and R08 exams. It outlines the two pools approach in asset allocation and briefly discusses the advantage to using this approach.

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 Many candidates aren’t aware of this, which can result in candidates studying out-of-date information.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

We all know that when we sell our house, it is exempt from capital gains tax (CGT) if it’s been our main residence. If we can’t claim it as such, then any gain we make on disposal will be subject to CGT. Read on to learn about the letting exemption and how it is applied – useful reading for those who are revising for any of the CII AF1, AF5, R03 or R06 exams.

Here’s how one member of our technical team found the first ever sitting of the CII’s AF7 Pension Transfers exam.

Do you know what sort of a learner you are? Do you understand how you already process, store and retrieve information in your day-to-day life? This article discusses the profiles of different types of learners.

The team has just finished putting together the analysis for the CII’s AF5 October 2017 exam sitting, and it became clear that child benefit may feature and can often pop up in AF1, as well as the multiple-choice R03 exam. So, here we remind ourselves how it works and what clients can do to get it back – useful for AF1, AF5, CF1, R03 and R06 revision.

We’ve all heard of the 14-Year Rule for Lifetime Gifts, but how many know (remember?) how it works? This article examines the impact on inheritance tax liability when this rule is being applied – useful for CII R03, R06, AF1 and AF5 exam revision.

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 October

Friday 20 October

Friday 13 October

Friday 6 October