But what looks like a huge sum is not so impressive when you consider what you might need for a comfortable retirement. Today, a pension pot of £100,000 saved throughout a working life would buy a 65-year-old non-smoker an annuity, or annual income, of £6,000 to £7,000 a year (or £580 a month), and that’s before tax.

And don’t forget inflation: as the cost of living rises, a fixed monthly sum will buy less and less. To avoid this, you can take out an annuity that allows your retirement income to rise in line with inflation. However, at least initially, you’ll have to accept a lower monthly pension for this safeguard.

Of course, most people will receive a state pension. In this tax year, the full basic rate – dependent on your having worked for many years – is £84.25 per week. Those on low incomes can also get pension credits. Knowing how much you need to live on in retirement – and therefore need to save – is now more important than ever. In the past, many workers belonged to final salary pension schemes, which guaranteed to pay out a percentage of their final wage. But many companies are now closing such schemes to new entrants and demanding higher contributions from all staff.

The £100,000 example cited above pays an income that, for many, won’t be enough to support their current standard of living. Yet it’s much greater than the average private pension savings pot amassed by Britons: industry estimates of this vary from £25,000 to £32,000.

YOU NEED A BUSINESS.

THAT’S WHAT YOU NEED!

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Read our guide below to see if you are making the right decision.

1. Which Franchise?

Usually prospective franchisees come to us with a particular franchise in mind. The first thing we always ask is – why select that one? There are lots of franchisors who would no doubt like to have you as a franchisee. Before you buy a franchise you are in a real position of power. If you decide that you want to purchase a franchise repairing car dents or selling promotional merchandise, check out all franchisors and compare their schemes. Whatever the franchisor says, they rarely sell a franchise very quickly, so some extra research time spent before you buy could save you a lot more than time in the long run.

2. Do Your Homework

Once you have narrowed down your choice of franchisor, you should do your homework thoroughly. In particular you should ask to speak to other franchisees of the business who are up and running and see whether they are happy with the way things are going and the level of support they get from the franchisor. Also check out potential demand in the territory you have been offered. If it is already saturated with products or services similar to the ones you will be selling forget it or ask for another territory. Attend some business networking meetings and discuss your idea with people already in business. Often friends and family are not the best people to advise you so some independent advice from someone who does not know you well could be invaluable.

3. Do The Figures Add Up?

Ask your accountant to check out the projected figures to see if they are realistic. If there is insufficient profit margin once you have paid the fees to the franchisor then regardless of the effort you put in you are not likely to have a successful business. Also check with existing franchisees that the projected figures are achievable. You need to be confident that you can make a living from the franchise.

4. Negotiate On Price

Once you have done your homework and are sure that you want to go ahead we can give you advice on how to secure the best deal on the terms from the Franchisor. Some franchisors will say “take it or leave it” but others , in particular more recently established Franchisors may be open to negotiate on the price. They may be open to you paying the initial fee by instalments or may even make a reduction in the initial fee.

5. Negotiate The Territory

You might also be able to increase the size of your territory by negotiation in order to maximise the potential profits of the business.

6. Take Legal Advice Before It Is Too Late

Many of the enquiries we get are from current franchisees who were not advised when they took on the franchise and are now desperately seeking to leave it. With our advice before you take on a franchise we can save you both time and expense. Quite often our advice will more than pay for itself by better terms negotiated or a risky franchise avoided. We are keen that you don’t make a big mistake.

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I remember the day I upgraded to Windows 95 and it felt like going from the stone age to the iron age – the Start Menu seemed like a great idea and it looked fantastic – my world was changed forever.

I’ve been using Windows ever since and as soon as the latest version Windows 7 was released, I upgraded from the previous incarnation that dreadful resource hog Vista I installed it and started using it day-to-day for business and pleasure.

Initially I had liked widows 7, I was impressed by some of the cool animations and effects, I liked the icons and there seemed like a few decent improvements over the XP/Vista experience. Windows 7 was quite snappy and everything appeared to work rather well. Of course, as is to be expected of Windows, things degrade over time. It’s slowed down a lot, various pieces of Microsoft software crash from time to time and the “Do you want to perform the following action?” dialog that pops up often from UAC just gets annoying and seems like a poor solution to spyware and viruses after a while. Frankly, it became a huge disappointment.

While attending the a conference in London I noticed a lot of attendees used Macs. My friend who I was attending with, has been trying to get me to buy a Mac for years and had a MacBook with him. As he started showing me the software you get with it I was blown away. It was absolutely clear that a lot of the new GUI (Graphical User Interface) in Win7 is directly copied from Mac OS X – except it makes more sense in the Mac as all of the GUI conforms to the same rules.

Straight out of the box there’s a bunch of useful software to let you create music, video, photo books and a host of other things you have to pay for with Windows. I use exchange server and the MAC immediately connected.

I looked at the Mac-v-PC adverts and forum reviews and they started to make sense. Windows machines are work-orientated and pretty dull on the whole, whereas Macs seemed more fun and creative at heart.

That time has come and quite frankly, I’ll never buy another PC. Everything they say about Macs is true – “it just works”. You get so used to having to continually tweak Windows to get things to work correctly, from graphics cards to the registry to a hundred other things. Not so on the Mac. One of the first things I did was connect to my home wireless network which was a simple case of picking it from a list, entering my WEP key and that was it. To connect to the local wi-fi on my Mac took perhaps 10 seconds start to finish and I was surfing the web. The connection has never dropped since. Within seconds the MAC had then picked up that I had a network printer and two network storage devices and without any issues it had (itself) connected with all these selecting the correct driver etc. . Interestingly the MAC was clever enough to make all the decisions itself.

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The government has signalled its intention to intensify the assessment of incapacity benefit and encourage those who are fit for work back into employment.

George Osborne said it was important to protect those with “genuine needs”, while cutting the welfare bill in order to reduce the budget deficit.

Last year £12.5 billion was spent on incapacity benefit and the employment and support allowance (ESA), which replaced incapacity benefit for people with long-term health problems.

Some 2.6 million people claim one of these incapacity benefits, and 10,000 of these claimants are currently being assessed each week for their ability to carry out some kind of work.

The country’s total welfare bill has nearly doubled to £192 billion since 1997, and last week’s emergency budget outlined spending cuts of up to 25 per cent in most Whitehall departments.

Ministers are evaluating potential cost-saving measures before October’s spending review, and the chancellor indicated further welfare savings could be part of a “trade-off” to cushion cuts in other public services and protect benefits for the elderly. Osborne said: “It’s a choice we all face. It’s not a choice that can be ducked. Of course we have to look across the piece at the welfare bill and of course we have got to look at individual benefits.” “That is what I want to be part of the spending review over the summer. It is a trade-off and some of these benefits are very much larger than most government departments,” he continued. “We have got to look at all these things, make sure it protects those in genuine need, protects those with disabilities and protects those who can’t work but also encourages those who can work into work. That is the purpose behind our welfare reform.”

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