Aviva and Friends Life Merger

agarnett

Hi berbatov10

I looked at your previous postings and saw that you have an FL investment in a fund called Rainbow I or some such.

I know nothing about it, but if it were mine, I would be on the phone constantly to Friends Life to try to establish exactly what charges are involved in my plan, how transfers in or out are handled, whether there is any enhanced tax free cash benefit, and what valuable legacy options may be built into the plan. If you get a reasonable sort of agent on the end of the line, they might be chatty enough to tell you some of the interesting things they themselves may have picked up from discussing your type of contract with other customers.

You can then add what they tell you to what you have learned by reading your own documentation collected over the years (assuming you collected it as opposed to wrote if off as pure bumpf!), and of course you can add learning from what contributors to this forum have suggested in the past - but don't forget to add a pinch of salt!

Slowly you may be able to form your own judgement as to whether your plan is a keeper with interesting legacy options, or whether it is sensible or safe to try to add to it or liquidate it or part of it at a date sooner rather than later.

I am not a financial advisor, but like hundreds of thousands of others of various skills, levels of commitment and attributes, I so easily could have been! The main reason I am not one is mostly because I always liked to advise and sell on the basis of rigorously acquired insurance technical expertise backed by the technically defined promises I was then able to make being reliably upheld, and not on the basis that my employers might massage and even totally renege on the promises any time they might feel like it in the years after I sold well intentioned deals.

Sorry I can't really help you with yours other than to say try to learn and become the best expert on your own contracts now. I don't think anyone else is likely to truly become one for you, even if you pay them

greenglide

I am not a financial advisor, but like hundreds of thousands of others of various skills, levels of commitment and attributes, I so easily could have been! The main reason I am not one is mostly because I always liked to advise and sell on the basis of rigorously acquired insurance technical expertise backed by the technically defined promises I was then able to make being reliably upheld, and not on the basis that my employers might massage and even totally renege on the promises any time they might feel like it in the years after I sold well intentioned deals.

So you could never have been an IFA as the "I" in IFA is "Independent".

From your recent posting history and recent rants about certain companies you could never have been independent about anything!

Independent means "impartial" in my book.

agarnett

greenglide wrote: »

So you could never have been an IFA as the "I" in IFA is "Independent".

From your recent posting history and recent rants about certain companies you could never have been independent about anything!

Independent means "impartial" in my book.

Your book is wrong. Independent [STRIKE]means[/STRIKE] does mean, and the "I" in IFA should mean, free from outside control; not subject to another's authority; not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence.

That fits me. It allows me to take my experience of an industry and its services and products over decades from both the inside and out and to make significant general pronouncements about the things I believe are wrong without worrying too much about who I upset. You can say I am biased by my experience if you wish. But that describes all of us.

Impartiality is for the judiciary. IFAs can gladly aspire to it if they have a strong will to do so, but that ain't what the I in IFA means and few of them would ever hack it in the judiciary, experience or nay.