PRSA’s have always been somewhere between a personal pension and a company paid pension. While most of the rules for pensions are the same, each type has a few differences around the edges. The rules that applied to your PRSA depended on whether the PRSA was an employer based one (even if the employer didn’t […]
I wrote at the end of March about the collapse of three banks; two in the US and one is Europe. Last weekend, we saw First Republic Bank taken over by JP Morgan in a merger that was rushed through over a weekend. It is not surprising to see more banks collapse after ones of […]
Life is about experiences, not possessions. It is about being able to recall about things that you have done in life. In saying that, I was one of the lucky 18,500 crammed into the RDS on Friday night to see Bruce Springsteen play what could be his last tour. Given his age and the energy […]
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger had a third partner, Rick Guerin. Like his partners, Guerin was a great investor but he was in a hurry to get rich. Where Buffett and Munger knew that in time they would become wealthy, Guerin leveraged up his investments. When the stock market fell 70% in 1973-74, he got […]
Ireland is a lot different to when I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. For the last few decades, people actually want to come to Ireland to work. There are great opportunities for people to work for some of the biggest companies in the world. But just like the Irish move abroad and […]
Years ago, anyone who had a work pension had a had a defined benefit pension. They didn’t have to worry about investment risk. Then came the defined contribution pension. You either invested in the With Profits fund or a Managed fund. At retirement, you purchased an annuity and that was the end of any concern […]
I remember when I was working on sales targets and charging as much commission as I could in telling clients “there’s no fee for you, the life company pays my fee.” This of course, isn’t true. The client pays for the broker’s commission through a higher annual management fee. I have explained how this works […]
For members of occupational pension schemes, the maximum lump sum payable on the death of a member is four times final salary plus the value of the member’s contributions and AVC’s. Any amount over this had to be used to purchase an annuity. This meant that not many schemes with death in service benefits went […]
We saw the collapse of two major banks in the US with Silicon Valley Bank in California and Signature Bank in New York failing. In Europe, Credit Suisse had to borrow up to $54 billion from the Swiss central bank. What happened and should we be worried that there will be another collapse of the […]
A friend of mine is eligible to join their new employer’s group pension scheme and asked me to advise them on it. Of course I obliged, but isn’t there a scheme broker to go through the scheme with them? No, they were sent an email with the form, asked to fill it out and return […]