*Please have your say in wave 7 of the lang cat’s State of the Advice Nation. Admins, paraplanners, advisers, planners, business owners all welcome – if you work for an advice business you’re wanted around here. Take part here and happiness can be yours irrespective of global political events.* 

So it turns out I should do Updates that clash with major events more often. Not only did lots of you drop me a note last week to say you actually were reading, but I got my very own troll! It’s been a long time since I had one, and now I have one I find I feel seen and validated. The chap is a super-brave anonymous keyboard warrior, who sadly doesn’t really know how to cover his tracks (hi Captain, hope the asset financing game is going well down there in Cornwall). He was keen that I should “f**k off and stick to the disco biscuits” and then wished me death.  

The good news for the Captain is that death will indeed inevitably claim me at some point, but I fear, given he has 16 years and one month on me, that it’ll get him first. In the great scheme of things, though, it doesn’t really matter, does it? The heat death of the universe is only 1.7 times 10 to the power of 106 years away assuming a linear increase of entropy; eventually all protons will be as weak as the Captain’s punctuation, matter will collapse and this will all wash away like tears in rain. 

I wrote last week a little about not letting the tax tail wag the planning dog. I was sort of worried what I’d written was daft as of course advisers would stop clients doing dumb things based on partial information, but it turns out I needn’t have. As I sit on the rattler from London to Edinburgh I find that not only have clients been doing dumb things, but according to Amy’s piece advisers have been involved too. Billy Burrows is exactly right here.  

However, clients fortunate enough to have a planner who has taken a measured view and resisted the hype may still start thinking differently about pension withdrawals. As young Michael Barrett observed here, the taxation regime for inherited pensions doesn’t look all that much fun.  

On the one hand, the order of withdrawal across tax wrappers doesn’t matter all that much assuming the overall amounts stay the same. But there is another potential implication as the industry gets to grips with what’s what. If pension money starts to leave the sector at a higher rate – and lots of people think it will – the main place it will go is into savings accounts. That puts it outside the ambit of providers and (much more importantly) advisers. I hardly need to point out the potential commercial result of this, with potentially quite significant sums on which firms have got used to charging a percentage moving beyond their grasp.  

I read a thing ages back which I think might have been from Royal London but might not about inheritances skipping a generation; the current crop of 70 and 80-somethings (at least the ones who aren’t running for office) aren’t leaving their bunce to the kids (hi!) but to the grandkids. The stats for what percentage of the grandkids retain the services of Grandma’s adviser are mixed (a subject for another day). So add one trend to another, and do you get something which attacks the asset base from which advisers and providers both derive their income? Don’t know. Maybe. Could be worth modelling out for your business.  

Worth keeping an eye on, anyway. And if it does turn out to be a problem, don’t worry. It’ll be fine. And if it’s not fine – see earlier comment on the heat death of the universe.   

Can I do do American Idiot as the music choice in case Merka votes the big baby with the combover back in? I can’t do that, American Idiot is too obvious, right? You can’t just put out an Update the day we find out the first results of the US election and just use American Idiot, can you? Yes, you can. Here’s American Idiot.