Retiring is a huge change for people, not just financially but emotionally. For decades, you have gotten up every morning with somewhere to go. You met and worked with people who have some of the same interests as you, often spending more time with work colleagues than your own family. Then it ends abruptly. Lots […]
Do you remember when you were smaller and your mum would let you and your brothers and sisters take something from the sweet press? And instead of taking one thing, you took loads of sweets? So she took away all the sweets? There was excitement in the pensions world with the annual funding limits being […]
A couple of Friday’s ago, while cooking dinner on the barbeque, I was flicking through Twitter on my phone. One tweet read that a liquidator had been appointed to Blackbee Investments in Cork. While I never used any of their products, I have a client who invested a considerable amount of money into one of […]
I have been working as a financial advisor for 25 years. I have been an “old type” advisor, charging high commissions to reach my sales targets. Thankfully, for over half of my career I have been a “new type” advisor, working for my clients and getting paid for the work I do. While the industry […]
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 […]