Business

How the High Street became a window on our political instability

Published

1 week ago

12 September 2026

Glantz from Rusi thinks that as legitimate businesses close, crime moves in. “Rents are down, there’s a lot of empty spaces, so landlords are willing to pretty much take just about anybody,” he says.

Plumb came up with a new name for these areas: the “shuttered front”, a string of constituencies with struggling High Streets that Power to Change think could play a pivotal role in future elections.

Indeed, Reform’s Nigel Farage and Richard Tice were among the first mainstream politicians to regularly talk about visible signs of High Street criminality.

In 2024, Farage said at an event: “You can see High Streets with five, six, seven barber shops in them.” Tice added: “Seriously, how come lots of these new barber shops have got no customers in them? How come they all want cash only? These are fronts for money laundering and drug money, and someone has to talk about it.”

And in a social media video he made last year – one that quickly set parts of the internet alight – Robert Jenrick, who was then the shadow justice minister, listed “weird Turkish barber shops” as a visible sign of decline, alongside bike theft, phone theft, and drugs in town centres. “It’s all chipping away at society,” he said. He later clarified that he was “obviously not talking about all Turkish-style barber shops”. Jenrick defected to Reform earlier this year.

Some politicians argue the language around High Street decline is in danger of becoming racially coded. In January, Miatta Fahnbulleh, then the devolution, faith and communities minister, agreed when asked by the Guardian if she thought the focus on Turkish barbers had racist overtones. “Yes, I do. The fundamentals aren’t to do with the colour of the skin of people running our High Streets. It’s to do with long-term decline and neglect.”

At the time a Reform spokesman was quoted as saying: “This is not a matter of ethnicity.

“The National Crime Agency itself has said many of these establishments are used as fronts for money laundering as well as a whole range of criminality which is why they carried out hundreds of raids on them last year.”

Meanwhile, immigration – the issue that voters consistently highlight as among the most pressing, and that Reform campaigns heavily on – came up in our investigation too. We exposed a Kurdish gang that was enabling migrants to work illegally in mini-marts the length of Britain, by offering to put their own names to official paperwork. Trading Standards told us they find a constant supply of staff from asylum hotels, who are vulnerable to abuse by employers, working in those shops.

Josh Nicholson, a researcher at the Centre for Social Justice think tank, says, “Chaos and flux in Westminster are reflected in our High Streets.

“People feel powerlessness, they look at Westminster and see an inability of politicians to grapple with the basics and that feeds down to a local level.”

This feeling of helplessness came up again and again in our travels.

“Nothing is going to change,” Daniel, in Swansea, told us about the criminality on his High Street, which has become a hub for counterfeit rolling tobacco. He has seen violence on the High Street and an increase in raids on High Street shops. He’s a dual British and Chinese national and was considering moving to Hong Kong.

“It doesn’t make me feel safe. I’ve got kids.”

Business

Columbia Dividend Opportunity Fund Q2 2026 Commentary

Published

3 minutes ago

19 September 2026

NewsAdmin

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Business

They Retired at 62 With $650,000 Between Two IRAs and Lived on His Pension for 11 Years. At 73 Their First RMDs Came to $42,000, on Top of the Pension

Published

9 minutes ago

19 September 2026

NewsAdmin

They Retired at 62 With $650,000 Between Two IRAs and Lived on His Pension for 11 Years. At 73 Their First RMDs Came to $42,000, on Top of the Pension

Quick Read

Leaving $650,000 in IRAs untouched for 11 years grew the balance to $1.11 million, forcing a $42,000 first-year RMD on top of pension income.
The couple missed 11 years of Roth conversion opportunities at the 12% rate, pushing RMD dollars into the 22% bracket instead.
When one spouse dies, the survivor files under single brackets where the 22% rate starts at $50,400, making the same RMD far more costly.
Two retirees, same $1 million, same 4% rule, buy one finished with $1.4 million, the other hit $0 in 12 years. Our free reader guide explains the flaw that separated them, and the income-first method built to avoid it.

Let’s start by considering a couple retiring at 62. His pension covers the mortgage, the groceries, the property tax, and the trip to see the grandkids twice a year. Two traditional IRAs, hers and his, hold a combined $650,000 on the day they stop working, and they never take a distribution. Now imagine that eleven quiet years have passed, and then the first required minimum distribution letter arrives, followed by a second, and the number attached to those letters is larger than either of them planned for.

A smiling older woman in a pink shirt, straw hat, and sunglasses points at a blue globe while an older man in a green polo shirt, straw hat, and sunglasses holds the globe. A purple suitcase and passports are visible on a wooden desk with a laptop in a home setting. — Studio Romantic / Shutterstock.com

This pattern is fairly common. Pension income covers essentials. The IRAs sit as “just in case” money. Leaving them untouched often costs more than it saves.

What The First Distribution Actually Looks Like

Required distributions from a traditional IRA now begin at age 73 under SECURE 2.0 for anyone born between 1951 and 1959. The amount is calculated by dividing the prior year-end balance by a life expectancy factor from the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table. At 73, that factor is 26.5.

Assume the $650,000 grew at roughly 5% a year for eleven years. The combined balance at 73 sits near $1.11 million, producing a first-year required distribution close to $42,000. At 7% growth, the balance reaches about $1.37 million, with a distribution near $51,700. At 3%, roughly $900,000 with a distribution around $34,000. The growth rate assumption drives the entire number.

The 4% Rule is Broken, Built On A World That No Longer Exists

Every retiree knows about the 4% rule, but it frames retirement as a slow liquidation and still causes retirees with seven-figure accounts to agonize over a dinner out.

There’s a different way to run the math that makes more sense today. Build an income floor — dividends, interest, and Social Security that cover your essential bills every month — and you never have to sell shares into a down market just to pay them.

Our free reader guide, The 4% Rule Is Broken, walks through it in about 15 minutes. Access the report here.

Two IRAs, Two Separate Rules

Each spouse’s account is subject to its own required distribution, calculated on that spouse’s balance and age. A person with several IRAs may total required amounts across their own accounts and withdraw from whichever they prefer. A spouse cannot do this for the other spouse. His distribution cannot come from her IRA, and hers cannot come from his.

Missing the deadline triggers a 25% excise tax on the shortfall, reduced to 10% if the amount is withdrawn and reported within a correction window. Couples who assume they can consolidate the withdrawal into the larger account may discover the penalty on the account they skipped.

One important exception applies here. If a spouse is the sole beneficiary and is more than ten years younger than the owner, the Joint Life and Last Survivor Expectancy Table applies instead of the Uniform Lifetime Table. This produces a smaller required distribution for the rest of the owner’s life and changes the arithmetic materially for couples with an age gap.

Cost Was In The Eleven Quiet Years

For eleven years, this couple filed jointly on pension income alone. The 2026 12% bracket for married couples filing jointly runs to $100,800, with the standard deduction at $32,200. Every year they lived under that ceiling, the room between their taxable income and the top of the 12% bracket was room they could have used to convert IRA dollars to Roth dollars at a known, low rate. That room does not carry forward. It expires each December.

Partial conversions during those years would have reduced the balance hitting the distribution table at 73. Instead, the full balance arrives intact, on top of the pension, pushing top dollars into the 22% bracket, which starts at $100,800. This is the setup we walked through in a free guide on defusing the first-year tax bomb before required withdrawals begin.

What Stacked Income Triggers

Distributions plus the pension also change how Social Security is taxed and can push you over Medicare income-related monthly adjustment amounts. For 2026, a joint return with MAGI above $218,000 pushes each spouse’s Part B premium from $202.90 to $284.10, with a matching Part D surcharge. The thresholds are strict; crossing a bracket by a dollar effectively doubles the cost for a couple.

Survivor Problem That Follows

The heaviest risk appears later. When one spouse dies, the survivor keeps the larger Social Security benefit. The pension may continue at a reduced percentage or stop entirely. The deceased spouse’s IRA rolls to the survivor, consolidating the balance. Household income drops while the account grows relative to it. The survivor files under single brackets, where the 22% rate starts at $50,400, and single IRMAA thresholds, where the first surcharge tier begins at $109,000. The same required distribution now falls on less income at higher rates. The same required distribution then falls on less household income at higher marginal rates.

What Remains After 73

Once distributions have begun, a qualified charitable distribution can satisfy the requirement without the amount appearing in adjusted gross income. It is available beginning at age 70½, with an annual per-person limit indexed for inflation, and it must go directly from the IRA to a qualifying charity. For a couple that already gives, routing the gift through the IRA rather than writing a check protects MAGI and can keep the household under the next IRMAA cliff.

Withholding federal tax directly from the distribution is also simpler than quarterly estimates and is treated as paid evenly through the year. With a 10-year Treasury yield near 4.94% and the national average one-year CD at 1.71%, the reinvestment decision on what is left after tax also matters, though it is a smaller lever than the bracket and IRMAA work.

The deadline recurs every December. For this couple, the eleven quiet years were the expensive ones. The distribution itself is the smaller part of the story.