Kind of a big deal – Budget musings
No-one expected that. Budget? we thought. ‘Meh,’ we thought. We were wrong. This is the most impactful budget in terms of personal finance for a long time; certainly since the A-Day days, and maybe since I joined the industry in the mid 90s. Industry response has been feverish and has had us thinking of Anchorman […]
Exit fees and why platforms shouldn’t be like mobile phones
Just a very quick blog as I haven’t posted in the last week; been out and about touring, talking about auto-enrolment rather than platforms. Just for giggles. To mix it up. What a rock’n’roll life I lead, etc. Anyway, we jack-in-the-boxed in the Telegraph as part of a story on exit fees on platforms; something […]
Exit fees and why platforms shouldn’t be like mobile phones
Just a very quick blog as I haven’t posted in the last week; been out and about touring, talking about auto-enrolment rather than platforms. Just for giggles. To mix it up. What a rock’n’roll life I lead, etc. Anyway, we jack-in-the-boxed in the Telegraph as part of a story on exit fees on platforms; something […]
A blog about retiring
Annuities are a hot topic at the moment. So I decided to step away from the recent industry noise and take a closer look at the market for myself. Here’s what I found. First, it’s crass to talk about the annuity market as a whole. Market rates vary so much from client to client that […]
The tedium of going o’er
The news yesterday that Aviva has stopped its workplace savings platform programme (read the story here and here) is interesting in lots of ways. Now, before the yellow and blue dudes reading this start reaching for the batphone to the legal heavies, I should mention that I’ve worked on the Aviva workplace savings programme on […]
A warm(ish) gonzo welcome to auto enrolment
Well, we made it. Today is 1 October 2012 and the culmination of years of effort on the parts of many. From the talk of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ compulsion (a full 10 years before Fifty Shades of Grey) to the realisation that this was unstoppable; from the furore over NEST charges to the as-yet unproven […]
IMMIGRANTS IN SEX PENSION ROMP RIP-OFF SHOCKER!!!!
Sorry, came over a bit Daily Express there… A few stories have been smashing into each other (in my head, at least) over the last few days. First, LV= (how I do hate that equals sign) dipped a toe into the post-RDR insured pension space with their new low-cost adjunct to their SIPP. The trolls […]
A few thoughts on the pension strikes
So a funny thing happened last weekend. I say funny, it wasn’t really, but you know what I mean. I was having a drink with a friend who’s a healthcare professional in the NHS. We were talking about the 30 November industrial action. She’s not going out on strike, as she has quite a lot […]
Active Member Discounts – Oops! We Did It Again
I don’t do much writing on pensions these days, but before all the platforms stuff I was a corporate pensions dude and once you’ve been there, it never leaves you, sort of thing. So I was fascinated to see that the issue of Active Member Discounts (AMDs) on group pensions is rearing its head again. […]
Active Member Discounts – Oops! We Did It Again
I don’t do much writing on pensions these days, but before all the platforms stuff I was a corporate pensions dude and once you’ve been there, it never leaves you, sort of thing. So I was fascinated to see that the issue of Active Member Discounts (AMDs) on group pensions is rearing its head again. […]
