Post Office Equity bond ~ shocked at the return value!

Reaper

The problem is that the posters here have taken out a product which they did not understand. GEBs might sound simple in their headlines (FTSE100 growth with a guarantee you will not lose your capital) but in reality as soon as you read past the headline you will find a complicated product with high costs. For example you get no dividends which is essential if your are investing in large cap companies as they do not experience growth in the same way smaller compaies do.

If you want to see what happened over the last 5 years click here and then press the "5y" label on the graph. If you had done that before taking out the product you would have found the previous 5 years were no better than the last 5 years. Click on the "10y" label to see what I mean.

For the future I suggest you choose a proportion of your money you can afford to take some risk with and invest directly without any costly guarantees or complicated small print.

dunstonh

No wonder the financial institutions are rich, too busy conning us all.

That has nothing to do with the product you bought though.

The product did exactly what it was meant to to and exactly within the terms that were published. Unfortunatly, you dont appear to have undestood what you bought and as you bought without advice you don't get the consumer protection that advice offers you. You should see the list of risk warnings that appear on a suitaiblity report for structured products. Not many of these warnings appear on those bought without advice.

jamesd

GingerG, that did what it was supposed to do, sad though it is when the market ended up at the same value, ignoring dividends of about 3% a year that the product provider keeps.

If you'd like an alternative approach that offers results that are likely to be better, put about 70% into a five year term deposit savings account and 30% into a FTSE All Share Index tracker fund like the HSBC institutional one available from Hargreaves Lansdown. The income from the savings plus the dividend will provide protection down to about a 50% drop in the FTSE index at the end, while you're likely to do better at any end value above that.

The 70:30 split is approximate, the actual values vary depending on the interest rate available on term deposit account.

One disadvantage is that you will see the value variations in the FTSE part over the years and that might worry you. One advantage is that this part of the money is available with minimal notice at any time, unlike the structured product version.