POUND NOTES

FINANCIAL FACT

HOUSE sales were down by 40% year-on-year in March, figures from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) show.

Across the UK, 102,810 home sales took place in March, according to HMRC’s provisional figures, marking a 40.9% decrease compared with the 173,860 transactions recorded in March 2016.

The plunge compared with a year earlier is seen as being due to tax increases for buy-to-let investors, imposed on April 1, 2016, with a spike in sales seen last year as landlords snapped up properties ahead of the changes.

FIFTYSOMETHINGS ‘FEELING THE PINCH’

THE average “squeezed” fiftysomething has more in debts than savings, a survey has found.

Excluding mortgage debt, the average person aged 50-59 owes £4,641 from borrowing, such as credit cards loans and overdrafts, according to the research from Nationwide Financial Planning.

This outweighs the average amount of cash that they have put away in savings accounts, at £4,511.

INCREASE IN CURRENT ACCOUNT CUSTOMERS ‘DITCHING AND SWITCHING’

MORE current account customers have been ditching and switching their bank in recent months.

Some 248,302 switches took place between January and March according to payments body Bacs, which oversees the current account switch service.

This was higher than the 208,387 switches that took place between October and December 2016.

MOST RETIREES’ PLANS ‘UNAFFECTED BY BREXIT’

TWO-THIRDS of people expecting to retire this year say Brexit has not affected their plans, a survey has found.

Some 67% of people planning to retire in 2017 said their plans have not been altered by the vote to leave the EU, according to the research from Prudential.

But there were some signs of uncertainty, with more than one in 10 (11%) of those who were planning to retire in 2017 saying they had changed their retirement date directly because of the referendum vote.