gareth123

Yes, of course you should. Caveat emptor. A fool and their money, and all that. They could wise themselves up my reading a few books but have obviously chosen not to.

fast bloke

No - they have chosen to use an advisor who claims to work in their best interests. I can not morally make that claim and then look after my best interests. I disagree that I should be able to do so legally either. What do you do for a living? run an MOT garage or something?

fast bloke

mmm - a sudden silence from Gareth - Maybe he does run an MOT garage..... 'that'll be £400.00 for us keeping your car for two days and not even looking at it sir - ta very much'

gareth123

Sheesh, sorry for 10 mins of silence It's the middle of the day here and I'm supposed to be working. To keep your car theme going, I see it like walking onto a used car lot and asking the salesman which of his cars I should buy. What sort of fool does that? So why would anyone ask commission based salesman which product is best for them?

How are your personal investments? Why do you work for a living?

Jye

Cheers fast

Jye

So where do hamburger chewing muppets like me stand Ian as SL sent me all these forms to fill in?

fast bloke

mainly cos 45k a year isn't enough to retire on and I actually enjoy being useful - You seem to be blinded by your own lack of ability to do something for someone else.

These people are not asking a commission based salesman to make a recommendation. They are asking someone to act on their behalf in an area where they have no understanding. Sort of like getting the AA to do a car check before buying.
Yes I get paid commission. Most of my business comes from referrals because i do a good job for people and they are happy that they get the best advice possible. Look at it like this - I can make 3k for an hour giving bad advice, or I can make between £600 - £1000 an hour for good advice. If half the people i give good advice to recommend my services to one of their friends, eventually I will be making £600.00 per hour, 40 hours a week. If I give bad advice then I will continue to make 3k an hour sporadically, maybe once a fortnight when some poor sucker walks into range.

You seem to be claiming that you make a living from managing your investments on another thread. If this is the case then I would be surprised that you think 45k is enough to retire on

Jye

Well said Fast, gareth nip down to burger king and get me something healthy m8

fast bloke

supersize salad for me while you are there

gareth123

Nothing like getting the AA to check a car before buying, none of the sellers of the cars you're getting checked out are giving a slice of the profits to the AA man.

Where did I say I make a living managing my finances?! I've just managed them well enough that I won't *need* to waste my days working for someone else, be that writing code or talking to wet behind the ears college grads about money management. If either of those are your idea of fun I suggest you get out more

If you're a fee based advisor, a nice flat $500/hr or whatever, then OK. But as you get commission on the products you hawk your opinion ain't worth **** to anyone with an ounce of sense.

What are the typical annual fees of the products you recommend? Any correlation between the size of the fee gouging and the commissions the salesmen get? Do the 0.18% pa funds pay you as well as the 1.5 pa ones?

fast bloke

I don't do investments - too hard to find clients with a large wad of cash to look after. I do mortgages and insurance - Most of the mortgage companies pay similar proc fees. Usually about .3% of the mortgage. The sub prime ones can go up to 2%, but if I get someone a sub prime mortgage when they don't need one I aint gonna get any referrals. If I get someone a reasonable deal, another advisor will come after me and tell them it is only reasonable. If I get someone the best deal available along with an amount of insurance that is justifiable, then no-one can steal the business. I have a client for the next 25 years, and I have the referrals. The value of referrals is much much larger than the value of a single client. OK - I admit, I am only in it for myself, but it is much easier for me to make a substantial income by looking after my clients than it would be by fleecing them. To add to that - I don't charge fees. I make more than enough on commission. Most people buying a house are already getting fleeced by estate agents and solicitors. I don't feel the need to add to that pain.

I get the impression that you have maybe come across a few people who would actually sell the endowment without explaining it and you find it hard to accept that someone can do a good job for you and look after themselves into the bargin.

btw - If I do refer an investment client to one of our investment advisors, the size of the fee is usually about the same regardless of the product chosen. This is paid for from a marketing budget in the insurance companies and is unrelated to the management charges as a general rule

gareth123

Well kudos to you then. In my experience you as exceptional compared with your peers. The financial advisors, investment planners, mortgage advisors, whatever that I've met have tend be morons. It doesn't take a lot of skill really, does it? And if the client wants information that wasn't cover in the week long training course at head office... oh dear.

Admirable that you think you be around with the same clients in 25 years time. I suspect most financial product salespeople are not looking at it that long term. They might be selling double glazing or cars 5 years from now, so why should they care?

I wonder how many of the mugs sold crappy endowments went on to recommend their advisors to their friends initially - "we pay for the house and get a free holiday AND a new car at the end!"? Quite a few I'd bet...

FYI my accountant / financial advisor does a reasonable job for me but I pay her a flat hourly fee. As it should be IMO.

IanW

If it was the company that I work for, then that would be a sign that we have taken on your complaint, when we send out the acknowledgement we include a couple of forms, asking for details of your policies etc...

fast bloke

Advisors who sold endowments properly are few and far between based on the sucess rate of complaints. However - a fair few of them where probably doing what they thought best. It was Gordon Brown who really feked things up. I agree that there are a large number of people in the business who are in it for the quick buck, but if you do it right it is an easy living. I don't think a 1 week training course really covers it.
So you use the same person as an accountant and a financial advisor. Jack of a money trades sort of thing. There seem to be a fair number of mortgage advisors/accountants/investment advisors/IHT planners on here, but yours must be specially gifted to cover all those areas..... unless they are the 1 week training course breed. My accountant looks after my income tax responsibility, I look after his mortgage and someone else looks after his investments. Sort of like getting your Scoob serviced at a Scoob garage and your Ferrari serviced at a Ferrari garage instead of taking them all to Greasy Joe round the corner

jimbrit

Does this also apply to ISA mortgages?

We were told the same thing. i.e that we would pay off our mortgage and have some left over

gareth123

I'll tell her you called her 'greasy'

She does my taxes. They're bit complicated at the moment. I've used her as a sounding board for some financial planning I've done for myself, espeically the tax consequences of it. I don't know if she sells products, I don't think so. More of a sanity check than an advisor really. But the key is she's paid a flat fee.

If it's more than a weeks training I want know how many days classes the dipsh!ts from UBS I saw two weeks ago have skipped Nice suits and haircuts though Ack, it's those 1.5% pa fees again!

fast bloke

For an ISA mortgage you probably signed up to a 5 or 10 year review, in which case you indicated that you understood it was possible the premiums would not be sufficient to cover the target amount. Otherwise you wouldn't need a review. ISA mortgages are very different - for the past four years you have been making advantage of pound cost averaging. Say you invest £100.00 per month in your ISA. For example, in Dec 1999 (FTSE at 7000) that would have bought you 1 unit in a ftse tracker. By March last year the same £100 would have bought you 2 units(ftse at 3500). If you look at these isolated dates then you nearly break even, as your £200 has now bought you 3 units worth 4500 each. Say you stop buying units now and the ftse goes back to 7000 - your purchase will be worth 21000 for a cost of 16000. INstead of taking two isolated events, work this out on a monthly basis. Providing that you make regular contributions over a long enough period, and you do not encash the investment at an all time low point, then in theory it should work in your benefit. The benefit is really down to the tax allowance totalled up over a large number of years. An endowment works in a completely different way, and you do not benefit from pound cost averaging

The important thing to note here is that 10 years ago, an endowment was considered the most tax efficient vehicle for paying off your mortgage - gordon brown abolished MIRAS along with tax relief on life contributions which is the real key to the endowment market falling to bits. The same might happen to ISA mortgages, but without a crystal ball no-one knows

fast bloke

Where you from? Have you heard of 'The mortgage shop' - That is a weeks training and a 16k OTE salary. If you have lived at your current addy for 4 years, have never missed a payment on anything, have been in the same job forever, have no special requirements for your mortgage, only want twice your salary for a mortgage, have a 50% deposit and want the cheapest monthly payment - then the mortgage shop is the place to go. If you don't fall into the 'easy money' criteria then you need to talk to someone who understands the entire market. At this minute in time I can source a mortgage from over 10000 deals. Many of these are similar, but 1 week training is not going to equip anyone to look at all the deals, understand the small print, apply it to an individual set of circumstances and come up with the only one that is 'the most suitable deal'

A decent mortgage advisor can probably save you as much in a lifetime as a good accountant - A crap advisor can cost you much much more - How do you choose? word of mouth?

Tell Greasy I said Hi

gareth123

I'm from England originally but I live in the US now. Never heard of 'the mortgage shop'. I've had two mortgages in my life, I picked them out myself - both interest only. Not exactly difficult to pick out the cheapest one, is it? Did you use a broker for your car loan, or could you figure out the best deal on that one?

When I'm in the supermarket I can even figure out if the cans of beans are cheaper in the multipack or individually! I shun the bean brokers! Last one I spoke to wanted 1.5% of my beans-on-toast, the parasitic ******.

fast bloke

If you can pick them yourself and you got the best deal then well done. You managed to search through 10000 varities of beans and get the one that was exactly what you need... brilliant.... not everyone has the same bean understanding Some people might look at the calorie content and forget about the taste - others may not give proper consideration to the fart co-efficient. I have to hand it to you - you obviously know everything there is to know about everything. We have a special phrase for people like you down the pub

Look - In all honesty - If you are 100% certain that you understand the mortgage market inside out then fair play to you, you have something that most people don't. What do you do for a living?

gareth123

LOL, I don't know everything about everything, or everything about mortgages, but I am able to compare loans, do math, and figure out the cheapest one. It's not exactly rocket science, is it? Or have you got a degree in rocket science but chose to sell mortgages?

I don't see what my profession has to do with my stunning ability to pick the smallest number from a selection of numbers, but anyway I'm a software engineer.

fast bloke

Ha - I used to be one of them as well - before that I was a computer programmer

It has no bearing on your ability to choose the best mortgage you could find. It has a fair impact on your ability to understand the small print though(degree? fairly intellegent?), so that you know that from the deals you can find, you can work out which was the best one. How do you know you checked all the deals though? Why did you decide that interest only was appropriate? Did you pay an arrangement fee? If so could you have found a similar deal with no fee? If not was there a product with an arrangement fee and simialr APR with daily rest that would have cost you less pounds over a given period? Did you have access to a real time mortgage sourcing package that would show you all available products updated within the last hour?

Most importantly - who buys your software - why do they not write their own - I know that I have the technical ability to write a program to do anything that you can write a program to do. However - i can see that you might be able to produce more efficient code as you do it for a living, while my code will work, it might struggle on a benchmark test?

gareth123

The computer programmers around here found their jobs are now in India and became mortgage salesmen, realtors, insurance salesmen...

jimbrit

Cheers FB

Tiggs

nothing wrong with commision based advice...a recent study found that twice as many ppl wanted fees over commision- the actual result was 5% for commision, 10% for fees......the rest for good advice and not fussed how the persons was paid.

i run a firm dealing only with high worth clients with IHT/investment needs.....we invest millions a year, in some case individuals invest millions at a time. while we have a fee tarrif that anyone can work to only a very few people decide not to work on commision......and before you suggest the clients are mugs they live in an area with the highest avarage house price in the UK and have spent their lives building sizeable wealth...they are not mugs and they get advice from us that 95% of advisers wouldnt have a clue about.

T

Paul .G

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