The Financial Blog

Every so often on our travels around the web we happen across some sites that might be of use, and being the benevolent souls that we are we like to pass them on!

The latest of which is a nifty service for US residents that offers to cut in half the time you spend filing your returns, and more importantly, cut your tax bill!

Or as they put it: With the tax services offered through Joycetaxservices.com consumers can eFile a return and literally cut their tax filing time in half.

So if you think this may be handy for you go and check out Joyce’s Tax Services and see what you think!

According to Catalist the average price of petrol has now officially passed £1 per litre!! Petrol now costs £100.08 and diesel £103.32.

Industry experts Catalist are blaming the weak dollar combined with record worldwide oil prices.

The cost of a litre of fuel breaks down like this; 14.9p is VAT, a massive 50.9p is duty (thanks very much Gordon Brown), retailer approximately 0.04p. The cost of production and delivery is just 0.31p – so in total we’re being ripped off to the tune of around 0.69p for every litre of fuel, that’s if it was tax free! (Dream on….)

Head of road safety at the AA, Andrew Howard said “More and more retailers are accepting that they have to break through the psychological £1 per litre barrier.”

“It is likely that with the average now through the barrier more increases will follow.

“This, coupled with steadily rising prices on the world oil markets, means that relief for the British motorist is unlikely in the near future.”

Oh the joy of British motoring! And I’ve just forked out £67.00 to have a puncture repaired and a new tyre on my 7 year old Peugeot 206. 

As announced in the pre-budget report, anyone who is in a civil partnership, married couple or are widows or widowers, will have their inheritance tax threshold raised to £600,000.

So the boffins at Halifax have got their calculators out and it seems from their figures that this will now make 80 per cent of properties exampt from inheritance tax! 

That’s apparently 2.4 million homes nationwide. Only 600,000 homes nationwide will be eligible for the duty.

Halifax’s chief economist, Martin Ellis heaps praise on the chancellor stating  ”"We commend the Chancellor on his decision to increase the effective inheritance tax threshold to £600,000 for couples.” and “We also welcome government moves to consider house price inflation when considering increases to the threshold in the future.”

However taking another route is Bradford and Bingley whose “head of wealth” is quick to state that the “measures do not go far enough” pointing out that nothing changes for single people and divorcees.

So two sides of the coin there - in my opinion anything that provides tax relief for even a portion of the UK population is a welcome change, and while criticising may get your name in a few stories, overwhelmingly this change will be met wih a positive reaction and leave a lot of people without a huge tax burden at the time that they need it least.