End of Free Financial Advice

Credit-Crunched

MoneySaverLog wrote: »

Any advice given by the banks needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, as recently evidenced by Panarama.

This shows the ignorance of the general public, the only thing that needed to be taken with a pinch of salt were the shocking case studies, one sided journalism, shocking examples and yet more scare mongering in an industry all ready running scared

Loughton_Monkey

Porcupine wrote: »

You can... some intermediaries rebate (some of) the trail commission: see this list.

Though what surprises me is that they don't keep the 'institutional' funds for the bulk holding. For example, a randomly selected UT has an A unit with a TER of 1.9% and a Z unit with a TER of 0.21%. The Z unit has a minimum purchase of £1m. But the platform holds billions of pounds worth of assets which tend to move quite slowly: why can't the bulk of the assets be held in the Z unit, with the amount needed for short-term trading be the A unit?

Thanks, I'm aware of the rebates. But I wrote my post quickly, and intended (basically) to plea for much more rebate than we currently get. What HL get, for example, is not a million miles away from what an IFA would get for advice and time.....

Don't know, but I suspect the Z units are indeed the A units. I suspect all units are basically exactly the same 0% TER fund. Then the fund gets carved up and sold at 0.2% load for your institutionals, at 0.75% to your platforms, 1.00% to IFA chains..... with possibly a few 'bonus' kickbacks where appropriate.

I'm just making up those figures, but you get the idea. I can only believe that every fund [which in terms of portfolio is exactly identical] is indeed one massive fund - invested together - priced daily as a 'raw' fund. But each fund has 93 different 'flavours'. One for Fidelity. One for Scottish Widows. One for Legal & General.......

Each flavour then gets the appropriate loading applied to produce today's 'price'. All fully computereised no doubt.

jimjames

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

This is a can of worms, and I tend to think that increased legislation/regulation can complicate rather than make things 'better'.

We have, in this country, a specific problem of [simplistically] poor education, coupled with the ultimate in 'Nanny State-ism' - a dangerous cocktail.

Look, first, at the absolutely huge proportion of the population who (a) have no concept whatsoever of saving money, and (b) even when they do, cannot understand the 'offerings' of simple savings accounts offered online or on the High Street. For this segment of the population, one has to wonder if anything will cure the problems.

I think this goes to the heart of the problem. Unfortunately I don't have any quick answers to how to educate people to save money. Even now with mortgages becoming less available to those without big deposits you get people saying they cannot save any deposit despite earning well over double the national average wage.

Even the recent example of supposed mis-selling of PPI seems to be an example of nanny state again. Surely if you buy something you check that it is suitable for your needs. If I buy a car that is too big for my garage then that is my fault; buy a house that only has 1 bedroom to fit my wife & 4 kids then that would be too. Buy an insurance policy that I didn't really need then claim back the costs later on for mis-selling. I'm sure some of it is more complex than that but whenever I've been offered PPI in the past I always declined - my choice so I'm really not sure it counts as mis-selling in the same way that private pensions were.

IronWolf

Im not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, I have fallen prey to free, biased financial advice from banks. On the other hand, I would never have paid for it so my money would probably be sitting in a savings account and as a result Id have less money now.

dunstonh

IronWolf wrote: »

Im not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, I have fallen prey to free, biased financial advice from banks. On the other hand, I would never have paid for it so my money would probably be sitting in a savings account and as a result Id have less money now.

You have paid for it and you probably paid more for it. You just didnt see it as the product charges were that much higher and you paid for it that way.