TAX-FREE LUMP SUM
Money you can take from your pension at retirement. With personal or stakeholder pensions it is up to 25% of the value of the fund, with occupational pension schemes, it's the equivalent of up to 25% of the fund.

TENANTS IN COMMON
If you and your husband/partner/friend own property as tenants in common, you can specify how much of it each of you will own (e.g. a 60:40 or 25:75 split). You have to do this in a separate document called a declaration of trust. When you die, your share in the property does not automatically pass to the co-owner. It will only do so if you have drawn up a will that says that you would like this to happen.

TERMINAL BONUS
A payment that's added to a with-profits policy when it matures. There's no guarantee that the with-profits provider will pay a terminal bonus from one year to the next; neither is its level guaranteed.

TERMINAL ILLNESS BENEFIT
This is normally included in life insurance policies so that if you're diagnosed with a terminal illness, you can be paid the policy benefits. In some cases, you may receive less than the policy would have paid out when you die.

TERM INSURANCE/ASSURANCE
A life insurance policy that runs for a specified term (for example, ten or 25 years). It's the cheapest form of life insurance and is useful if you want to ensure that a debt, such as your mortgage, will be paid off should you die.

TIED AGENTS
Financial advisers who work for one company (e.g. a bank or insurance company) and who can only sell and advise on its products. They may be paid by a mixture of salary and commission or performance-related bonus.

TITLE DEED
A legal document identifying the owner of a particular property. Until fairly recently, if you had a mortgage on your property, the mortgage lender would keep the title deeds until you had paid it off in full. However, these days mortgage lenders seem happy to rely on the fact that the Land Registry (or Register of Scotland) records ownership of properties, including whether or not there is a mortgage on it.

TOTAL EXPENSE RATIO (TER)
A measure of the annual costs and charges of an investment plan. Normally, funds that track a share index have a lower TER than those that employ a fund manager.

TRACKER FUND
An investment fund that buys shares in companies that make up a particular share index (such as the FTSE 100 or the FTSE All-Share). Different tracker funds have different ways of operating. Some buy shares in every single company that make up an index (and sell it as soon as the company is no longer included in that index), others use a sampling technique and buy shares in all the big companies, but only in a selection of smaller ones.

TRACKER MORTGAGE
A mortgage where the interest rate rises and falls in line with the Bank of England base interest rate. It's normally higher than the Bank of England base rate, but there is a guarantee that when base interest rates fall, so will your tracker mortgage (and vice versa when base interest rates rise).

TRANSFER VALUE
The amount an investment policy would be worth if you were to move it to a different company. It takes into account any penalties or charges for transferring from your current provider.

TRAVEL INSURANCE
Insurance that pays out if you have to cancel your holiday, you lose your baggage or money or fall ill. It sounds like it's relatively straightforward, but it's actually a very complex policy. The most important element is the amount of medical cover (especially if you're travelling to the United States, where medical costs are high). Reading the small print is very dull, but it's important that you know what you will be covered for as some policies that look similar on the surface can be very different.

TRUST
A legal arrangement that allows you to hold money or assets in one person's name (called the beneficiary), while they are controlled by others, who are called the trustees. There's lots of jargon around trusts and they can be complicated.

TRUSTEE
If you belong to an occupational pension scheme it will be run by a group of people known as trustees. The law states that at least one third of trustees have to be nominated by scheme members (as opposed to the employer). The term also refers to people who make decisions about a trust.