standard life windfalls £250 fixed payment ??

carnet

Did not say all WP members signing-up over the last 5 years would be baggers - just the vast majority of them - and I stand by that statement, although no-one but SLAC will ever know what % of these were £20 SHP's.

Don't get me wrong, I've absolutely nothing against bagging - indeed I bagged everything in sight myself 5 years ago .

Only in the case of SLAC am I not a bagger - although did do a rollover on one family policy - and before you say anything, yes it was a calculated gamble - got a total enhancement of 8.42% and the Bond is currently showing a profit of 15.6% in 3 years.

Add on the windfall in 6 months or so and it will be a fair return .

dunstonh

IFAs continued to give Standard their top awards until 2004.

Standard Life used to be amongst the best for service. Their product range wasnt too bad for the times. Then they decided they didnt need service, didnt need IFAs and didnt need to offer competitive products any more.

People's_Will

We are going to have to agree to disagree, carnet. I find it your estimate of 240,000? SHP baggers quite amazing. That would be 10% of the membership.

Standard was prominent in promoting SHPs in the early days as it wanted to be in the government's good books to aid its own defence of mutuality. So many investors taking out a SHP will not have done so for a windfall, but because Standard was a visible SHP provider.

Others will have invested in Standard because they believed in mutuality whose star was, and is ?, in the ascendant. Even late in 2005, endless surveys, reports and journalists sound off about the superior performance of LifeCos that are mutual, ignoring the fact that it is the weaker mutuals that have had to demutualise and so the conclusions drawn from the data are seriously skewed.

As dunstonh testifies above, Standard had the support of IFAs from 2001-4 because of its superior service levels.

I think you grossly overestimate the power of financial websites before MSE got into its stride. But the founders of The MoneyBag will no doubt feel a warm glow inside on demutualisation if you are right.

IMHO there is a big difference between popping into your local building society to open an account in your lunch hour and going through the trouble of opening a SHP.

At least we can agree that only the Standard Life board has the exact numbers. These things are usually a closely guarded commercial secret.

IIRC, I still strongly believe that SHP baggers are an insignificant red herring in this wider debate about the right structure for windfalls.

Happy New Year .

carnet

Although the Money Bag has just over 7,000 actual members there are normally close to 100 guests, who have not registered, online reading the boards at any one time compared to just one or two members.

If even a fraction of all those who read the boards (and the site has been up and running for almost 6 years) took out £20 SLAC WP SHP's for all eligible family members, told their friends.....

- and that is only one website.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion - logic just happens to prevent me from agreeing with it on this occasion .

Happy New Year

People's_Will

You choose to ignore the spiders, the multiple members - for which I understand the Money Bag is famous - and the early members who would probably have invested in Standard Life long before the SHP regime and the signaway.

carnet

All sites have these, and, in any case, they would not make a great difference to the overall figures.

TMB was only given as one example. There was also the Carpetbaggers site and others.

In any event, as I've suggested, it's not so much just the actual membership of these sites but the thousands of others who have read and acted upon the info. over the years.

IMHO your figure of 2,000 is fanciful in the extreme - add a couple of noughts and you might be getting there.

AS you have previously said, lets just agree to disagree and leave it at that.

EdInvestor

People's_Will wrote:

We are going to have to agree to disagree, carnet. I find it your estimate of 240,000? SHP baggers quite amazing. That would be 10% of the membership.

Not quite sure why this thread has got bogged down with this minority (to say the least) issue. :rolleyes:

Given that most members do not have large policies, a larger flat rate windfall will surely benefit the majority - and in a more significant way than it would have done in 2000, when windfalls would have been perhaps twice as large.

When you're facing a mortgage shortfall, every little helps, as they say.An extra 250 quid can go quite a long way.

Poppy9

But surely carpet baggers are going to vote for DM whatever as if it fails they will get nothing. Therefore SL can set a min of £200 if they wish knowing that the £50 investors would rather this than nothing.

bilbo_2

ahh carpetbagger.com they were the days

People's_Will

People's_Will wrote:

IFAs continued to give Standard their top awards until 2004.

dunstonh wrote:

Standard Life used to be amongst the best for service.

Whom did they serve? Investors or IFAs?

Another poster has stated that he can't believe that investors bought Standard With Profits Products after 2001 for anything but a windfall.

And yet IFAs can't have recommended them on those grounds, or they would have been up before the FSA.

Can dunstonh explain on what grounds IFAs did continue to recommend Standard Life With Profit Products between April 2001 (when stakeholders were introduced) and March 2004 (when demutualisation was announced) ?

I can see that there were legitimate grounds for IFAs to do this, although I vaguely sense that others may disagree.