The picture above is how advisers picturing themselves. This blog argues that for most of us, it’s nothing like this!
- I find it extraordinary that we consider it necessary to pay for advice to take our pension.
- But that’s the implication of this post!
- We should be taking expensive financial advice now we are too knackered to carry on working!
- But we can get round advice by using a piece of kit that tells us what we can draw out of our pension scheme?
- Was either advice or software as a service built into the product we were auto-enrolled into?
- I thought that a pension was perfectly simple but it’s not!
- This is the madness we have created for a generation wanting to retire with money but no pension plan.
The answer the industry is selling me that I don’t buy!
Kevin’s kit is called Guiide and it’s free to use from this link . It is a wonderful piece of work and will allow most people who are financially educated to work out how much they need or how much they’ll get depending on whether they want to know what to save or what they’ll get from what they’ve saved.
Variants of this software as a service, are being developed by all the leading DC savings providers as a way to help us take our money. But it’s so hard to take these complex decisions that people take the money in one go or take nothing at all. Most of us have no capacity to organise our own drawdown in a half way sensible way!
This software would reduce the risk for people who have worked out what drawdown is. It helps you doing your drawdown according to some kind of plan. Put like that it seems quite easy but…
People are asked whether they want to take tax free cash, whether their drawdown should increase as years go by and there’s a lot to answer about how much risk you are prepared to take , answers to questions depend on growth in my fund. But risk is the enemy of security!
Infact, once I’d been through seven screens of Guiide I found myself smug that I could follow the path and find myself with a report , but I do not find answers to questions easy to take on board. I don’t find any of the statements below make much sense to me
At this point I realise that there is a lot of information that I am supposed to take on board. It’s information that I cannot process, I don’t want to organise my future finances for myself.
I don’t want to be my own financial planner/adviser!
This is where I look not to DIY solutions but a solution which is done for me. Because no matter how I feel comfortable with theories like the rule of 4%, there are simply too many variables in my face doing this stuff!
Look at this and then consider all the things that go into my retirement plan, they’re listed on the left of my “dashboard”!
And this is not including my defined benefit pensions and my savings and all the stuff I know I should be taking into account of! Life is just too complicated for a dashboard!
Instead of making it easier, my dashboard has just intimidated me with the wealth of information that I need to input to get somewhere! We cannot do all the choices here, when the choices can make lifechanging differences to our and our family’s lives.
This stuff drives me to an adviser or it drives me mad! Kevin Hollister addresses my dilemma when he says of folk like me
I think they should take advice, but the fact is less people are.
More and more people are flying solo.
As more people choose to do that, they are going to need the right kit, or advisers need routes which can help make advice less costly.
There are legions of people like me who neither can or will pay advisers; we find the complexity of decision making needed to drawdown from our pot for 30 years – too hard.
Technology is a help for some but for most of us it is simply too hard to organise our lives around financial plans that we (and not advisers) are responsible for.
This is why I am moving back to where I started before financial planning took over. I want to know that I will get from my savings a pension that will keep up with inflation, pay my spouse a pension if I die before her and I want the tax-free cash that I was promised when I started saving 42 years ago!
Do I really need advice to get what I was promised?