Monthly Roundup for October 2018

Missed reading some of our useful articles this month? Wish you could turn back time to rectify that? No need!

We know you may not have had the time to read all our blog posts in October, so we’ve made it easy for you with this summary of this month’s CII-related posts.

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.

A recent focus on companies such as Deliveroo and Uber has highlighted the issue of whether someone is classed as employed or self-employed. Read on to learn some guidelines that can indicate the employment status of a worker.

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 Many candidates aren’t aware of this, which can result in candidates studying out-of-date information.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

Looking at the case studies for this month’s R06 exam, it looked highly likely that a question on pensions and divorce was going to be asked. It also raised a few queries as to the options available to an ex-spouse. Here, we look at the options of pension sharing and earmarking.

In this article, we look at Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS), Venture Capital Trusts (VCT) and Seed Enterprise Investment Schemes (SEIS) – useful for your CII AF1, AF4, AF5, J10, R02, R03 or R06 exam revision.

While many of us like nothing better than to listen to a selection of our favourite artists while poring over revision material, others maintain that ‘hear-a-pin-drop’ silence is the only tolerable learning environment for them.

Clustering, or segmentation, is something that is tested within various CII exams. For example, it can feature in AF1, AF4 and perhaps even AF5, as well as at diploma level with R02 and R03. In particular, it seems R03 is a firm fan of testing a candidate’s knowledge in this area. Read on to learn how best to answer this sort of question.

A question that has come up in J02, R03 and AF1 is the grossing up of chargeable lifetime transfers where the donor (also called the settlor or transferor) pays the tax on transfers over the nil rate band. In this article, we share with you a couple of examples that will help with your CII 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 26 October

Friday 19 October

Friday 12 October

Friday 5 October