Saint James's Place

bowlhead99

reeac wrote: »

Not sure that you're comparing like with like with your supermarket analogy.

Well, it's true I wasn't comparing apples to apples. More supermarkets to financial services business.

At Waitrose, a 500g pack of Essentials boneless skinless chicken breast is about £4 (~£8 per kg). Some Waitrose customers are a bit squeamish about handling raw poultry so when the Help is away and they have to do their own cooking, they will willingly pay the same price for a lower weight pack of chicken breast 'chunks' all chopped up for them (~£9 per kg); or the same price for an even lower weight pack of 'mini fillets' (~£10 per kg)

At Lidl, a 590g pack of Birchwood Farm British Chicken Breast Fillets from their everyday range is £3.19 (~£5.40 per kg). If you're willing not to have a large neatly formed chicken breast because you're only going to chop it up into chunks or short thin slices anyway, you can have the chunks or mini fillet version at £1.99 for 410g (~£4.85 a kilo).

Their customers have a totally different mindset from the Waitrose set, but they are all still getting a little over 30g of protein from every 100g of boneless skinless chicken breast.

The 'reassuringly expensive' prices at Waitrose will hopefully help their customers recognise that the Lidl everyday range of non Big Brand food is "highly unlikely to be of comparable quality" to the Waitrose unbranded 'essentials' range, and so they are willing to pay 45-50% more for chicken breast and literally double for their mini fillets. Chicken thighs are more than double.. So, it's probably better. Or maybe the Waitrose Essentials chickens led quantifiably happier lives - though not as nice ones as the Waitrose Duchy Organic range with their *much* higher price point.

This 'expensive and slick so it is probably better', and the service is always polite and comes with a smile, is how SJP make their money. So it's a valid analogy imho, when Waitrose prices even its basics as premium products to cover its premium running costs.

We actually buy meat from a proper butcher, bread from a proper baker and fish from a proper fishmonger anyway.

It's quite a middle class thing these days to separately go to the butcher, baker, candlestick maker etc as many can't spare the time and inconvenience to search out the best independent sources for each food group rather than grabbing it all on one trip to a supermarket.

Other than in smaller towns and villages, it tends to happen when people can afford one member of the family not to be working 9-5; there is probably some correlation between the demographic who can afford to pay for the service levels of HL or SJP, and those who can afford to use Waitrose supplemented by separate butchers and bakers and fishmongers.

As for finance we are HL people as at least they answer promptly and I can understand them if I phone them, unlike the staff from the two building societies which we have just abandoned in favour of a local non-demutualised one. Good service, like good food, is worth paying for in the long run.

If it ain't broke, no need to fix it, so if you don't mind HL's fee scale you probably haven't needed to do a comparison with other platforms to see if they had decent service too. It's good that HL have a well-staffed customer service desk (and they have always been fine when I've called them on behalf of my parents who had accounts there).

However, perhaps needing to phone them is in itself a bit of a customer service fail - if things always worked properly and all the administration could be done online, there would barely be any opportunity for phone staff to build a good reputation for customer service.

SeniorSam

SJP , other financial advisors or platforms will not select investments for you. They are not allowed to. The best they can do is establish the risk profile of the customer and indicate the investments that are within that area. With SJP, they will only offer their own products as they are not independent, so the choice will always be limited. Far better to obtain their suggestions and compare other investments yourself. It's not so hard to get onto a site like Hargreaves Lansdown and se whats available within your risk profile, but even better to get on to various money forum sites and see what others are saying. Lists like HL Wealy 50 are only a very rough guide and do not have all the investmenst that are doing well. In particular, they have just removed Lindsell Train Global Equity (Class D) and Lindsell Train UK Equity from their wealth 50 but both of those funds have been doing very well for some time now. They also do not include the likes of Fundsmith, which is another great climber.

Just use the fund selection, look at past performance over 1-3 -5 years and compare. THEN talk to SJP again.

harlequin55

As an ex SJP Client I thought it may be helpful to add my thoughts on their proposition. I signed up in full knowledge of their reputation as being expensive. However, what initially attracted me was gaining access to what I had been made to believe was their “stable” of some of the best fund managers in the business who otherwise I would find it difficult to access. Over the time I was with them I became increasingly disillusioned at the performance of these managers in comparison to their peers. The Citywire web site allows you to make this comparison over periods of up to 10 years. I summarised this information and challenged my SJP partner with the data who said this would be looked into. As you might guess I had no response. The final straw for me was when I looked at the annualised returns for the regional funds in which I was invested only to find that just one of the managers had managed to beat equivalent regional tracker funds despite their supposed expertise!

SJP play on their advisory role and there will be those who want their hand held when it comes to financial matters. However this will come at a significant cost together with fund performance equivalent to that of a low cost tracker.

jsinc

reeac wrote: »

Not sure that you're comparing like with like with your supermarket analogy. We are confirmed Waitrose people ... Good service, like good food, is worth paying for in the long run.

Is it? Let's say your shop costs an extra £20pw vs equivalents elsewhere. If you instead invested £20 weekly, increasing with food price inflation at 2.5% pa, for e.g. 6% pa return minus 0.5% pa fees for 30 years = £107k. Or £51k in today's money at 2.5% CPI. Over 40 years it's £218k or £80k today.

That's long run financial independence several years earlier, and why I don't shop at Waitrose etc. Or use SJP. But each to their own value assessment.

Alexland

SeniorSam wrote: »

SJP , other financial advisors or platforms will not select investments for you. They are not allowed to. The best they can do is establish the risk profile of the customer and indicate the investments that are within that area.

While I agree with you on the non-advised platform business - the whole point of paying an advisor (independent or otherwise) is that they will select investments for you (from whole market or otherwise) and make a specific recommendation.

Alex

reeac

When we moved to our present place we looked around at possible food shopping venues and settled on a small town about 7 miles away which had a branch of Budgens. We used this for some years but, as said in an earlier post, got meat, bread and fish from separate specialists in the same town. After some years Budgens left and Waitrose took over. Much wailing, weeping and gnashing of teeth from local cheapscates. A couple of years later I happened to notice that, as my wife always paid with the same card, we had monthly statements and could pick out the last years worth of Budgens spends and the first years worth of Waitrose spends. Surprise, surprise ....the latter averaged slightly less than the former. The only explanation that I could come up with was that Budgens occasionally had a very good offer on a particular wine that we liked and which we then snapped up whereas we hardly ever bought wine from Waitrose, relying instead on our online supplier. Just shows that simply looking at a few price tags doesn't necessarily give you the overall picture. You get that by averaging a years worth of spending. Incidentally, adding in a few specialist shops doesn't necessarily cost much time ... they're all in the same street and the whole once a week outing takes about 75 minutes including the travel.

SeniorSam

Alexand, you are mistaken in your assumptions on this. Financial advisers make recommendations based on your profile, but YOU select the funds from that advice. You will have a 'Reasons Why' letter after you invested and it will show that YOU have chosen X,Y,Z from what was suggested. The clients rarely check the funds against others to see if they can switch the investments to improve matters. Also they rarely ask for more meetings with the advisers for additional advise on other funds. THAT is where a lot of the problems arise. Lack of information given by good advisers who actually know how to improve on an initial poor selection. They tend to remind you that you selected them.

It is essential to continually review and carry our some of the research yourself to compare what has been suggested against what else could have been. It's not hard to look up funds etc, see how they are performing and how they have performed in the past (I know that past performance is no guide to the future) but it does help to look it up.

I used to provide full research and performance charts for all my clients to show just why I am suggesting something. Then it's up to the client to select from that information. However, I don'y know how SJP do it.

Alexland

SeniorSam wrote: »

Alexand, you are mistaken in your assumptions on this. Financial advisers make recommendations based on your profile, but YOU select the funds from that advice. You will have a 'Reasons Why' letter after you invested and it will show that YOU have chosen X,Y,Z from what was suggested.

While it is ultimately your choice on if you follow their recommendation - advice should still be more guided than "here's various suitable things you might find interesting and I'll go away for a bit while you act like a monkey with a dart board".

Alex

SeniorSam

I totally agree. Another problem is that advisers all have to start somewhere and if you happen to get a newly qualified adviser, they know what the basics are, but it take time to really understand how to guide and help a clients efficiently. The company only wants results from sales. That's what has to change and it may be moving that way since I retired. I do hope so.

SonOf

Alexand, you are mistaken in your assumptions on this. Financial advisers make recommendations based on your profile, but YOU select the funds from that advice. You will have a 'Reasons Why' letter after you invested and it will show that YOU have chosen X,Y,Z from what was suggested.

That was certainly the case with FAs in the past (but not IFAs). I am not sure it is still the case post RDR/MIFIDII.