Wealth Management ?

[Investmentadvice]

Anyone got experience with using a Wealth Manager? In particular Fisher Investment? To manage your pension funds?

Would be grateful for any advice. At the moment we use the company pension funds and they invest in whatever they want.

Thank you. That is good to know.

Do they manage your pensions only or provide other advice?

How much do they charge if you don’t mind saying?

Out of interest, why stay away from St James Place (someone mentioned earlier on thread). Have just had them recommended to me!

DH is 5 years of retirement. I will probably follow after him, but I am much younger ; could continue for another 8 years until I am 60

They are known for their huge charges and I believe exit fees . I joined a couple of financial pages and all seem to say avoid .

Very high rates plus poor performance compared to lots of other options.

Watch this short RFS video which features St James Place

They are to financial planning what Miller and Carter are to Steak restaurants. You'll get advice, they'll meet your objectives, but you'll pay similar prices to what is done equally well if not better at similar price points. Its a well known network that is well known, but is often a big let down. Your price goes towards large marketing budgets. I'm not sure if Miller and Carter circumnavigate food safety rules like SJP seem to do with the Retail Distribution Review, but hey, never said my analogy was perfect.

Bear in mind you it’s the individual advisor who is important. I’ll follow mine if he leaves brewing dolphin because I’ve known him many years since he was green to the profession, he manages all our family funds, I can trust him to be honest with me and I trust him implicitly

Thank you

I’m with Reeves. Got an 11% return in the last 12 months.

If you want a referral code, let me know.

Thank you. How much do you pay on fees?

DH pension is with Royal London and mine is Standard Life. We don’t do anything, they manage it. Need to check on return percentage

Bumping as we are seriously considering hiring Fisher Investments to manage our pensions.

If you are going to use a wealth advisor, spend the time beforehand educating yourself so you don’t get taken for a ride. The ukpersonalfinance subreddit and Smarter Investing by Tim Hale are good places to start, and start keeping up with market news.

The returns of 11% last year quoted by a poster upthread don’t look so good when you know that cheap all world tracker funds over the same period are getting closer to 20%.

I would prioritise good tax advice over financial advice, although there is overlap.

My DH has about half his pension with Fisher and the returns have been excellent.

He has a monthly phone call with pension advisor that has been very helpful.

I think you need a minimum fund of 250k.

Some of the comments here misrepresent the services of a discretionary fund management service or similar bespoke arrangements. The value provided is not only investment performance. Yes, you may well beat the index by employing an IM but you may not. What an IM will do for you though is to take into account several aspects that you may not consider. Income tax and allowances, capital gains tax, ethical preferences, structuring portfolio around growth or income, or a combination, having a personal point of contact, having professional contacts, taking into account personal circumstances.

I'm not saying that employing a WM company is worth the cost, or not worth the cost. But talking exclusively in terms of gross returns and fees is reductive.

Speak to various companies to see who you like. Compare costs and compare the services they offer. And find someone you gel with.

Good luck.

Lots of good advice on this thread. One thing that stands out though is OP hasn’t actually said what the current pensions are doing wrong. Most workplace pensions are absolutely fine and unless you have especially complex affairs there is probably not much point in hiring somebody to “oversee them.” They’ll probably just charge you lots of fees for buying much the same investments.

Presumably, if OP is talking "Wealth management" rather than just IFA, I'd guess OP is in the HNW bracket, possibly £500,000+ of invested capital. I would suggest that irrespective of wrapper complexity, expert guidance is a service that would be valued by many.

That’s what a wealth manager will say they will do. In reality, certainly for amounts below £500k, if they are a reasonable sized outfit their discretionary management will be in one of their funds/modules and won’t be personal to you, although it might meet your requirements. If it is personal to you, then that isn’t great either, because a company that provides a bespoke service for that amount will not be able to afford a large number of people in their investment advice part, and so you are relying on a stock picking IFA type service, and you really have no way of risk assessing that until it goes wrong.

IMO after a great deal of experience in/with the industry, for amounts below £1-2m, if you are prepared to research how to invest, and then prepared to invest and not stock watch, and you are not an impulsive or addictive personality, you are better off doing it yourself, and paying separately for pensions and tax advice.

Have they not even told you their fees yet?