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Solo first time buyers earn €67,000, getting the most from your health insurance, and AIB Life launches

Business Today: the best news, analysis and comment from The Irish Times business desk

Solo first time buyers who purchase a new home were earning on average €67,000 last year, according to data from the BPFI. Photograph: PA

Ciarán Hancock's face
Ciarán Hancock
Tue Jun 20 2023 - 06:16

The average income of individual or solo first-time buyers of new properties in Ireland last year was €67,000, according to new figures from the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland. Eoin Burke-Kennedy has the details.

Are you getting the most out of your expensive health insurance policy? In some circumstances, you can claim money for pedicures, massages and Fitbits, writes Fiona Reddan.

If you’d like to read more about the issues that affect your finances try signing up to On the Money, the weekly newsletter from our personal finance team, which will be issued every Friday to Irish Times subscribers.

In the first of our personal finance Q&As this week, a reader wonders if they can claim tax relief if they pay their parent’s bill under the Fair Deal nursing home scheme. Dominic Coyle offers some guidance.

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In our other Q&A, a reader is expecting their first born child in the summer and wonders if they can set up a pension fund for the baby as soon as possible. Dominic Coyle looks at their options.

AIB Life, the banking group’s new life and pensions joint venture with Canada’s Great-West Lifeco, has officially launched, with the partners’ investing €250 million to get it off the ground. Joe Brennan reports.

Pension funds have bounced back from a miserable 2022 but they have some way to go before they recover all the ground lost in a tumultuous year, writes Cantillon.

With the cost of pretty much everything rising in the current high inflation environment, why can’t online news outlets hike their prices? Laura Slattery examines the reasons for this dynamic in her weekly media column.

The response from the Department of Finance to a decision last year of the European Union’s top court in relation to public access to registers of beneficial ownership has left a lot of lawyers here scratching their heads. Cantillon explains why.

In Me & My Money, Polly Doyle, founder of Polly & Andy Socks, tells Tony Clayton-Lea that “it’s a privilege to not have to worry about where my next meal is coming from”.

The widow of builder Joe Cosgrave claims his two brothers, Michael and William Cosgrave, and the Cosgrave companies, are opportunistically using her husband’s death to take control of the well-known construction and development group.

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