St James's place wealth management

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  • gadgetmind
    gadgetmind Posts: 11,130
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    bowlhead99 wrote: »
    SJP have a reputation for being expensive, rather than incompetent.

    It took me a long time to escape them, even with the help of an IFA, and my investments seemed to be across dozens of pots for no good reason. I'm kind of guessing fees had something to do with it!

    I couldn't make their final figures make sense, the IFA's head was swimming and I think he stopped trying, and years later SJP sent a letter that basically backed up my view, and the enclosed cheque for a tax paid £700 was nice.

    They are ruthlessly efficient at taking your money but "less so" when giving it back.
    I am not a financial adviser and neither do I play one on television. I might occasionally give bad advice but at least it's free.

    Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
  • dunstonh
    dunstonh Posts: 115,904
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    SJP are expensive. Very expensive. However, they are usually efficient.
    A death claim can be confusing to those that don't deal with them often. However, it is largely a case of forms requested and forms supplied. Any hold up is usually because one party is waiting for supply of something requested.

    Something like this should be easily resolved. Perhaps contacting SJP to find out what they are waiting for. Or ask the executers what exactly is holding it up. If they cant be specific then perhaps it is them rather than SJP.

    I have had several poor experiences with professional executors linked with solicitors. You usually find its not a solicitor but someone who has been on a course over a weekend and takes massive fees for doing a little paperwork. One slagged me off big time with false allegations. It turned out that because I had written a policy in a way that kept it out of the estate (on purpose), the executor could not include it in his fees (which were a percentage of the estate) and he lost £3000 that he thought he was getting. It turned out there was a bit of nepotism as the wife was a solicitor in the firm and the spouse was an unqualified executor dealing with their estate cases.

    So, don't assume its one side just because the other says so.
    I am an Independent Financial Adviser (IFA). The comments I make are just my opinion and are for discussion purposes only. They are not financial advice and you should not treat them as such. If you feel an area discussed may be relevant to you, then please seek advice from an Independent Financial Adviser local to you.
  • gadgetmind
    gadgetmind Posts: 11,130
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    dunstonh wrote: »
    the executor could not include it in his fees (which were a percentage of the estate) and he lost £3000 that he thought he was getting.

    And this is just one of the reasons why percentage fees don't work.
    I am not a financial adviser and neither do I play one on television. I might occasionally give bad advice but at least it's free.

    Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
  • dunstonh
    dunstonh Posts: 115,904
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    In the press today that SJP installed a new system back in October and it is having teething problems with information requests being slow to be delivered. Some requests are taking 45 days.
    I am an Independent Financial Adviser (IFA). The comments I make are just my opinion and are for discussion purposes only. They are not financial advice and you should not treat them as such. If you feel an area discussed may be relevant to you, then please seek advice from an Independent Financial Adviser local to you.
  • So St James Place or St James Palace as I call them.

    Last year my mother invested her entire savings of £ 100 K. with them.

    Their fees were 5% to say hello, then an ongoing 1.7 % annually so that was £ 6700 in fees gone from the pot to start with.

    What saintly advice would you expect for such a fee ?

    she asked for a low to medium risk investment which has just lost LOST 3.1%

    So an annual loss of £ 9800 near 10%

    Well the advisor from the Palace has now abandoned ship and become an IFA and he has advised her to move her money and give 'him' 6.05 % in fees to move it to a company that MAY perform better.........:T

    So my advice to anyone thinking of 'investing' with SJP , think again.

    Did I mention that they also have a 6% exit penalty clause on pensions .

    Did i mention that apparently due to their new computer system it is taking up to 7 weeks to take your money out.

    Did I mention that 50 of their funds performance is classed as poor.

    In Romania President Ceausescu built himself a Palace whilst the populus was left impoverished.

    IMAGE OF PALACE HERE.

    Eventually they got fed up, took him out and shot him.
  • gadgetmind
    gadgetmind Posts: 11,130
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    These up front fees, annual fees, poor performance, and churning, are why I'm now 100% DIY. I wish I'd done it earlier.
    I am not a financial adviser and neither do I play one on television. I might occasionally give bad advice but at least it's free.

    Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
  • jimjames
    jimjames Posts: 17,515
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    mitredog wrote: »
    she asked for a low to medium risk investment which has just lost LOST 3.1%

    Much as I dislike the rip off from SJP, I'm struggling with this one. What exactly did you expect from a low-medium risk investment? If you couldn't handle a 3% fall then you should have remained in cash.
    Remember the saying: if it looks too good to be true it almost certainly is.
  • bowlhead99
    bowlhead99 Posts: 12,295
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    gadgetmind wrote: »
    These up front fees, annual fees, poor performance, and churning, are why I'm now 100% DIY. I wish I'd done it earlier.

    But to go back to my point up thread, it sounds like the mother with her life savings didn't think £5k up front was an unreasonable charge, or she wouldn't have signed up.

    Unlike you or I who can see that £5k up front as something very expensive, she didn't. Which sounds like either:

    1) she is someone who didn't notice it was expensive and didn't think to shop around for places to get advice ; and so unlike you, would not be competent to shop around for investment opportunities, or

    2) she was so clueless about investments and with no compunction to learn, that she saw it as very expensive but worth paying because she felt she would mess it up by more than 5% herself, and unlike you, would not want to do it herself.

    The low to medium risk portfolio lost (LOST!!!!)3% apparently. That is of course often what low to medium risk portfolios do, when stock markets go down by (without knowing the specific timescales) 10% or more. No real issue with that.

    You can't say you want something-to-medium risk, and then moan about losing 3% when markets are broadly down. If you lost 30%, perhaps that's the time to think this is well out of whack with the sort of portfolio I wanted and the risks I can handle. 3% in the grand scheme of things for a long term investment is basically nothing -it's just a bit of noise on the graph. No indication that she would have beaten -3% last year by constructing her own low-medium risk portfolio.

    Also, if the portfolio gave a -3.1% performance, that is on the starting pot of what was invested at the start of the year: £95k. £5k had been taken away from the £100k for setup fees. So a 3.1% loss on less than £100k invested can't be as much as £3100 lost.

    Also, the advisor constructed a portfolio including advice, platform and management fee of 1.7%. If the portfolio was worth £95k at the beginning and £92k at the end, the fee taken at 1.7% would have been on somewhere between £92k and £95k, not on £100k. And for most fund portfolios the annual management fee would surely be included within the net investment performance return of -3.1%, rather than being in addition to it, but maybe SJP are different.

    But bottom line I don't quite believe the quoted figures that add to 9.8%. Perhaps mitredog or his mum misunderstand.
    Well the advisor from the Palace has now abandoned ship and become an IFA and he has advised her to move her money and give 'him' 6.05 % in fees to move it to a company that MAY perform better.........
    Well, that would seem a bit foolish if the -3.1% is a reasonable result for the market conditions and risk profile, and the bad performance at SJP was primarily down to the one off setup cost which has now already been paid and won't be paid again

    Tell him you are not a mug and find a more "normal" priced IFA.
    So my advice to anyone thinking of 'investing' with SJP , think again.
    Probably that's the impression most here have. It would have been worth visiting this thread and others, which said that they were expensive, before your mum went with them. The thread has been going for more than a year and appears on Google. So the fact that you and she didn't conduct any cursory research on price or returns before buying the SJP product, doesn't bode well for her making other smart investment decisions.
    Did I mention that they also have a 6% exit penalty clause on pensions .
    No. However they do have exit charges in early years which Mum would have known about when signing up. Though presumably a pension is not the product she bought so the point may be moot.
    Did i mention that apparently due to their new computer system it is taking up to 7 weeks to take your money out.
    No but there have been other complaints
    Did I mention that 50 of their funds performance is classed as poor.
    No, who carried out the research? Is that your mum's opinion or yours, or the opinion of someone who actually understands investments? Did you class the funds as poor because the funds went down 3% and you prefer things to always go up?

    Presumably your mum doesn't need 50 funds in her portfolio and presumably there are more than 50 funds on offer as you didn't say "all 50 funds are classed as poor". If there are 200 funds and 50 good, 100 middling and 50 poor, that's fine. I have some investments with some fund managers who have other bad products that i don't use.

    Also if the funds are only poor because of high fees rather than terrible investment allocation choices, that's just a duplicate of the complaint about high fees.
    In Romania President Ceausescu built himself a Palace whilst the populus was left impoverished.
    Whereas at SJP they tell you they are going to charge you high fees and they lay out their financial statements for the world to see because they are a publicly traded company, and people still flock to them. Unlike the Romanian populace, the customers have ample opportunity to shop elsewhere.
  • bigfreddiel
    bigfreddiel Posts: 4,263 Forumite
    dunstonh wrote: »
    Owned by Lloyds Bank. Reportedly up for sale.

    Typically one of the most expensive distribution channels going. Any IFA going to SJP is doing it for their own earnings rather than their clients.To give you an example of cost difference, I did a pension transfer from an SJP pension last year and the projection difference using some growth rates (so difference was purely down to charges) was over £300,000.

    I cannot believe an ifa would do that! How unscrupulous!

    Thanks for that info dunstonh, made my day.

    Cheers fj
  • gadgetmind
    gadgetmind Posts: 11,130
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    3% fall due to where invested, another 2x that due to their fees for delivering this fall.
    I am not a financial adviser and neither do I play one on television. I might occasionally give bad advice but at least it's free.

    Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
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