It was good to get to the CISI 2019 Financial Planning Conference in Birmingham this week and meet some old faces - always one of the highlights of these events for me.
I’ve just bought my dad an Echo dot for his 73rd birthday. He loves it. He’s also signed up to Netflix, stays in touch by WhatsApp and ‘likes’ everything I post on Facebook, writes Tessa Lee, MD of moneyinfo.
There are heaps of events for Paraplanners nowadays; high quality seminars, conferences and roadshows, many of which are specifically created by and for Paraplanners, writes Caroline Stuart.
I must confess I always had reservations about the Pension Freedoms when they were introduced by George Osborne in 2015 and the latest FCA figures seem to back up comments I made at the time.
St James’s Place Wealth Management has recently been hammered in the press, particularly by the Times, over its incentive schemes. At the risk of being hung, drawn and quartered I believe the criticism has been over-done.
A report published by Octopus Group at the beginning of August, reported that “almost a third (29%) of financial advisers polled said they expect to retire within the next five years, rising to 6 in 10 (58%) within the next ten.” This is “equivalent to more than 15,000 financial advisers leaving the profession out of a current total of over 26,600.”
One of the joys of the portfolio style of working that I am now able to follow is the variety of talented people that I meet.
If you’d told me 10 years ago that Paraplanners would don warpaint once a year and happily gather to chew over technical issues in a giant teepee in Northants I might have suggested you’d been smoking the peace pipe a bit too long.
Until now Financial Planners have treated the threat from robo-advisers as a limited one - and they have been right to do so - but that attitude may need to change, according to a recent report.
Starting is hard. Starting from scratch with a blank canvas is surprisingly scary and suddenly every distraction known to man is much more exciting. How you start isn’t irrelevant, but that you do start is crucial.
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There is a common mis-conception that Defined Benefit transfers are the scourge of society, an inherent evil that must be stamped out. This is far from true.
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me. When I'm 64.”
The move to Strong Customer Authentication in the online financial world is a topic few are getting excited about but it will change life profoundly for most people in the UK.
Over the years I’ve reviewed countless pages of pensions related regulatory and technical consultation papers, discussion papers, green papers, white papers, policy statements etc.