Julian Penniston-Hill's i-account

Julian_Penniston-Hill

payless wrote:

Yeah , !!!

Yes - call directory enquiries!

payless

perhaps have a read of http://www.saynoto0870.com/ or type in 0870 in the serach box on this site

Julian_Penniston-Hill

payless wrote:

Is it not true that to hold authorsition as an IFA you must be carrying out that activity ?

No it isn't.

payless

Julian_Penniston-Hill wrote:

You are quite right... Have spoke to our Trustees and they say;

It isn't them because they are a) to boring to have thought of it, and b) not stupid enough to use their company name if they were going to do so!

Not many new posters / consumers would have started a thread with a title like that , but obviously an exception

Julian_Penniston-Hill

payless wrote:

perhaps have a read of http://www.saynoto0870.com/ or type in 0870 in the serach box on this site

This is getting very much off the point. IM has an 0870 number (which I invite you to personally come to our offices and go though our telephone billing and account so you can see we don't recieve any money from it) and an 0115 Nottingham number.

You, and anybody else can call us on which ever number you prefer. They are both side by side on the contact us page.

cheerfulcat

To get back to the OP - regardless of the merits or otherwise of this particular set-up ( and I am not convinced ), it is not much use to SoNoble since he says

I am looking to invest up to £20,000 in another pension arrangement, sometime in the next 2 years when I expect to retire, to provide a little bit more over the next 20 years (I have a limited life expectancy).

The JP-H iaccount seems to be a ten year fixed term deposit account with the interest paid on maturity so will not provide an income.

whambamboo

This product has 99.9% certainty of underperforming the FTSE100 over 10 years, worse over longer periods.

Unfortunately financial journalists are not very bright.

The Times says:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9560-2288546,00.html

Richard Eagling, the head of pensions at Moneyfacts, the price comparison website, says that the iaccount offers great value: “The fee is lower than the charges on traditional personal pensions. This will boost the final value.”
The verdict

A qualified thumbs up. Mr Eagling says: “This product is good value and likely to appeal to cautious investors.”

This 'low fee' product is consuming the entire dividend yield of the FTSE & housing market: the yield of the FTSE100 is over 3%. So it's bizarre to say it's low fee.

It's rubbish - unless the yield of the FTSE fell to catastrophically low levels, it's guaranteed to underperform a normal pension. And of course it's relatively high risk and undiversified.

whambamboo

Interestingly, they are pushing their model for the National Pension Savings Scheme:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmtreasy/1074/1074we03.htm

God forbid the government listens to them.

We believe that to overcome inertia a savings product should provide:

— A clear and transparent structure with a low cost, understandable charging system—ie NOT a fund based annual management charge.

— stock market growth;

— house price growth
...
£14 million is wiped off the value of UK personal pension plans every day in pension fund management charges. This means losses to 10 million consumers of £5 billion a year.

Last year consumers individually (ie not including employers contributions, tax credits or contracted out payments) saved a total of £4.3 billion into personal pension plans—and the pension industry took £5 billion back out again in charges. This is because fund management charges are based upon the total amount invested, not the amount contributed.

We recommend a new and fresh approach to charging for the provision of the NPSS that decouples a management fee from the fund size. So it would not deduct a fund based annual management charge. A fixed annual administration fee charged either directly to the fund or provided for in the terms of the account is a far fairer and transparent solution. This would be fixed regardless of how much an individual contributes or how large their investment grows.

[We] would give the option to invest in:


— Accelerator Account (shown as "Blend" in the table above)

50% grows at 40% above the stock market (FTSE 100)

50% grows at 40% above house prices (Halifax HPI)

— Balanced Account—Stock Market Focus

20% grows at 2% above Bank of England base rate

30% grows in line house prices (Halifax HPI)

50% grows in line with the stock market (FTSE 100)

— Balanced Account—House Prices Focus

20% grows at 2% above Bank of England base rate

30% grows in line with the stock market (FTSE 100)

50% grows in line house prices (Halifax HPI)

This is ghastly.

They claim that the pensions industry is ripping people off, and then proceed to propose a guaranteed equity bond-style product, a product whose only purpose is to con the consumer into thinking that they are getting a good deal and a 'safe' investment, and hide massive fees (the entire yield of the market) behind '40% above' claims. The compounded effect of dividend yield is worth far, far more than 1.4 * the growth of the market (the growth, not the final value), but rather than admitting this, they claim themselves opposed to 'unfair' fees, while creating a completely untransparent marketing-driven product, whose performance is decoupled from the market, while the pensioners' money is actually potentially invested in speculative high-yield investments, which end up massively enriching the likes of Intelligent Money, and where the costs taken out far exceed those taken out by the existing pensions industry.

Nearly all pensioners would be worse off with their product than a simple FTSE100 tracker (which itself is unsophisticated and undiversified).

whambamboo

The biggest con with this horrible product is the fee. They charge £35/year for the product, which is designed to make you think that it's a low-cost product, as they are only charging £35, compared with 1% of say £100,000 with a normal pension. But of course the £35 is not where they make your money: it's an arbitrary number designed to imply that it's the only cost.

The real (massive) profits come through the fact that they are investing your money in something completely different from what they are selling you, and retaining all the profits from it.

The £35 charge is pure marketing, designed to present it as a cheap product.

Indeed:
"It is far from being a simple to understand product, and as the target market seems to be the unsophisticated investor, this is worrying."