In March 2008, Bear Sterns failed and was taken over by JP Morgan. A few months later, Lehman Brothers, the fourth biggest investment bank in the United States, went bust too. And the rest is history as the world experienced the worst recession since the Great Depression. To avoid the collapse of the financial markets, […]
As a young(ish) advisor during the credit crunch recession, I held a lot of meetings with shell shocked clients who couldn’t believe their money had fallen by so much. One such client, an architect, complained that if he designed a building that would fall down, he wouldn’t get paid for his work. Why should fund […]
Debt makes the world go round. We need it to buy our homes, otherwise we’d be saving forever to have enough money to buy it outright. Business’s need debt to get started and to expand. But when it comes to investing, we are increasingly reading stories of investments where investors have the value of their […]
For many, financial planning is all about the numbers. It is so much more than that. It is quite common for new clients to come in for their factfinding meeting, loaded with facts and figures on their finances and leave saying it was like a counselling session. If I don’t know your relationship with money, […]
You have spent your working lifetime saving. Putting money away into your pension and an extra few quid when you had the money. By being frugal and living below your means, you have accumulated a substantial amount of money and you have reached the financial planners holy grail…you are financially independent. You are now in […]
Ever heard of Dogecoin? It’s a cryptocurrency that was created by two software engineers as a joke to make fun of the wild speculation of cryptocurrency. This year, it is up 1,493% and that is after falling 33% in value since 08 May. At that point is was up a staggering 2,236% from the start […]
Before Donald Trump became president of the United States, the most famous Donald in American politics was Donald Rumsfeld. In 2002, as Secretary of Defense, he gave his famous “known unknown” answer when questioned about the lack of evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always […]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a response to an article that claimed that investors were paying 3% in pension charges. We showed that this was not true, but a valid point was raised, pension charges are opaque and need to be more transparent for investors. Get rid of allocation rates Allocation rates are […]
I have set up Google alerts for a number of different keywords, so every morning I get an email with articles linked to that keyword. One of those keywords is pensions and last Monday I got an alert to an article saying that six in every ten euro in a pension pot being consumed by […]
Financial advisors are always looking for ways to add value for our clients. A past offering was that of investment genius. There were investment geniuses all over the world offering their services as a financial advisor. When advising you on how to set up your pension and investments, the investment genius would tell you to […]