User:WGICandice
Even though I reside in Thailand for 50 weeks of the year I continue to earn income in the UK, as a landlord, and submit self-assessment tax returns online each year.youtube.com I wonder if they base expat status on local earnings or geographical location. 3 SIPP providers often found ranking high in various lists are; AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown, and Interactive Investor. I read somewhere that Interactive Investor are expat friendly. I currently hold 5 pensions, ranging from almost worthless to pretty significant.youtube.com I have little or no idea what their current charges and fees are. 90% of my personal pensions (the two most significant) are held with Phoenix Life.
One is called a Personal Pension Plan with profits, the other a Retirement Security Plan with profits. My main priority is the ability to see my current pension value/status easily online. I'm not really into trading and would rather adopt a relatively safe passive mode with funds, leaving the work to the 'experts'. I guess a lot comes down to total pension value and the relative fees which will be incurred. HL appear to be almost twice the cost of AJ Bell for remaining passive. I'll be honest, I have little or no idea of what current fees I pay on my pensions, but transparency, which I don't currently have, will be a major bonus.
M&G Investments has become the third investment company to freeze withdrawals from its UK property investment fund, amid a rush of people trying to pull money out of the market.youtube.com A6 billion) fund late on Tuesday afternoon. It a follows similar decisions by savings and investment groups Standard Life on Monday and Aviva on Tuesday.youtube.com A15.6 billion) worth of [https://www.hultprivatecapital.com/why-hult/ UK property investments] have now been locked in, as a result of investors trying to pull cash out in the wake of the Brexit vote. M&G said in an emailed statement: "Investor redemptions in the Fund have risen markedly because of the high levels of uncertainty in the UK commercial property market since the outcome of the European Union referendum. M&G’s fund invests in commercial property — such as office buildings and shops — which is a highly illiquid asset, meaning it takes time to sell. While most property funds keep part of the money raised in cash to return to investors who want to leave, this buffer has clearly been overwhelmed by demand for cash. But M&G, like Standard Life and Aviva before it, can’t sell its property holdings quick enough to meet investor demand.
As annual fund charge rebates become more common, so does the confusion they cause. Read on to find out all you need to know to be confident of getting a good deal.. One topic that seems to cause more than its fair share of confusion is annual fund charge rebates, especially when buying via fund platforms/supermarkets/wraps (or whatever else you want to call them) and discount brokers. What's in an annual charge? 0.5% - paid as a 'trail' sales commission to financial advisers. 0.25% - paid as a fee to the fund platform on which the fund is held. 0.75% - revenue pocketed by the fund provider.
Whereas trail commission is fairly standardised at 0.5%, the c0.25% paid to fund platforms is harder to determine - primarily because the amount doesn't have to be disclosed to customers. I wouldn't be surprised if some platforms take more than this, particularly on bigger selling funds that are promoted via 'recommended' or 'best buy' lists. How do fund rebates work? There are two sources of potential rebate: trail commission and the platform fee. Trail commission rebates (either partial or full) are given by some discount brokers - FSA regulated companies that don't give advice, but simply transact investments and collect commissions. These rebates are usually paid to your bank account or the cash account on the platform you're using.
Platform fee rebates are given by a few platforms who instead charge an explicit fee to customers for their services - i.e. they rebate the fee received from fund providers (to your cash account) and charge you a fee instead. What matters is whether the fee you're charged is higher than the rebated platform fee. What about discount brokers who operate their own platform? Discount brokers like Hargreaves Lansdown, Alliance Trust and Bestinvest who operate their own platforms ('Vantage', 'i.nvest' and 'Select' respectively) collect both the trail commission and platform fee, meaning they're often paid half or more of a fund's annual management charge.
Obviously they have to foot the bill for running a platform, but it does potentially increase their overall profits and/or ability to offer rebates to customers. There are quite a few permutations of the above, buying funds direct from platforms, on platforms but via discount brokers or advisers and from platforms operated by discount brokers. This means rebates can vary from zilch to around half the annual management charge, but the key is to look at the bottom line, i.e. what you'll end up paying after all rebates and extra charges. I've taken a look at a selection of options below to see how they stack up. Buy direct from Fundsnetwork and they'll be laughing all the way to the bank! Cavendish Online's one-off £25 revenue is so small I can't see them becoming rich from selling ISAs, still, it means a great deal for customers.
Clubfinance keeps a quarter of annual commission, but is still reasonable value despite Skandia's charges. Although Fairinvest offers the highest annual fund rebate, charges actually end up higher than normal after they and Nucleus have taken their fees. Aviva offers institutional fund pricing, but net costs return to the usual 1.5% after their platform charge and trail commission have been paid. Standard Life does thing slightly differently, but with the same end result. Alliance Trust Savings leads the pack by rebating all trail commission, although partially offset by their annual ISA fee. Fund rebates are a good thing - they can save you lots of money. But while some providers claim to be giving you a great deal, they end up pocketing far more for themselves than they rebate to you. Always look at your actual cost net of any other charges, as this can vary widely (see examples above).
The cult of personality in fund management is relatively new. The people managing our assets historically were hidden in the back rooms of big investment firms, subservient to the star dealmakers and traders. Perhaps inevitably in an age of celebrity, those who put up the best performances emerged from the shadows essentially as a marketing device. In the manner of Premier League footballers, they started to believe in their own myths and felt justified in earning huge fees. It is no accident that Neil Woodford and a close colleague, Craig Newman, extracted £96.8million in dividends and profits from the company that owns the funds they ran over the last four years. If Woodford had been true to his own investment strategy of picking unloved and unlisted shares for the long-term, he would not have been so quick to take extraordinary gains.
This is money which could have been used to waive charges for locked-in savers. In a world where investments are accounted in the billions not millions, the income could be regarded as small change. But not for the tens of thousands of small investors, lured into Woodford funds by investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown and upmarket advisers St James’s Place - both FTSE 100 companies in their own right - this is very painful. Lowson was drummed out of the City and the trusts were wound up. Will Woodford's fund lockdown help or harm investors? In my mind, the lesson of that event always has been: beware of funds that invest in each other. Hargreaves Lansdown offers clients (including this writer) a secure, low-cost investment platform which has literally hundreds of trusts to choose from.
What it should not have been doing is repackaging Woodford Equity Income and other funds into six of its own Multi-Manager investment packages. The reputational damage from both its recommendations of Woodford funds and deployment of them in crossholdings could be immense. St James’s Place, known for harvesting savers through posh cocktail parties, also deserves opprobrium. That the investors should end up in a Woodford fund, via a St James’s Place wrapper, is unfortunate. If it is any comfort to those who have fallen under the Woodford spell, he is not the first celebrated manager to have over-reached. Anthony Bolton earned a stellar reputation as manager for 28 years at Fidelity’s flagship Special Situations fund.
It all turned to grief when he sought to pull off the same trick in China. 293billion in assets at its height. The trigger for Woodford being required to freeze his equity income fund was the effort by Kent County Council to redeem £238million. By acting precipitously it has made life hell for tens of thousands of much smaller savers who are trapped inside, and investors in Woodford’s quoted Patient Capital, where the shares tanked 7.2 per cent yesterday. Investors in Woodford funds should have better understood what they were buying. Short-term gains are nice but Woodford has a strategy which involves spotting unrealised long-term value and backing unlisted companies.
There have been terrible calls, such as Non-Standard Finance (NSF) and builder Keir. There now has to be some kind of fire sale of holdings for liquidity to be restored and redemptions honoured. That is a bad outcome fomented by investor panic and short-term thinking. The collapse of the takeover by Non-Standard Finance for Provident Financial was all but inevitable. The fact that NSF chief executive John van Kuffeler and his Dad’s Army could not muster support in the City beyond the original backers, including Neil Woodford, doomed the bid. The Prudential Regulation Authority, the Bank of England enforcer, was very nervous that Provident’s authorised banking arm, Vanquis, would have ended up in unstable hands had the deal proceeded with so many investors opposed. Never has so much money been wasted on advisory fees for a transaction involving the most vulnerable borrowers in Britain.
4.7 billion) LF Woodford Equity Income Fund suspended withdrawals on June 3, the share price of his listed fund has dropped, along with the value of shares of many of his biggest fund holdings. WHAT CAN INVESTORS DO? The short answer is nothing for now. Their money remains invested in the LF Woodford Equity Income Fund and can only be accessed when the suspension is lifted. Woodford has posted a Q&A on his website detailing the process, explained his reasoning in a video and has pledged to reopen as soon as possible. The fund's suspension must be reassessed at least every 28 days.
While in theory it could re-open overnight, observers expect the closure to last a number of weeks. WHY DO SO MANY RETAIL INVESTORS FOLLOW WOODFORD? Woodford is among Britain's most famous fund managers. The 59-year-old made his name over more than two decades at Invesco Perpetual, before leaving to set up Woodford Investment Management in 2014, based in the university city of Oxford. He rose to prominence with his investment decision to avoid high-priced technology stocks, a move vindicated when the so-called 'tech bubble' burst and valuations fell sharply. He repeated the feat during the 2008-2009 financial crisis by avoiding banks, instead preferring stocks such as tobacco companies, which made strong gains.
WHY DID WOODFORD SUSPEND THE FUND? Trading in the fund was suspended because Woodford could not raise cash quickly enough to give back to clients who were trying to leave, including one of its larger investors, the pension scheme of Kent County Council in southern England. Another contributing factor was a series of disappointing stock performances, culminating last week in a sharp fall in the share price of construction and services group Kier, in which Woodford's fund has a significant stake. Limiting his ability to act is the relatively large amount he has invested in private companies not listed on a major stock exchange, that are usually harder to offload quickly.
IS THIS AN ISOLATED ISSUE? While any equity fund like Woodford's can theoretically invest up to 10% of their assets in private companies in the hope of securing better returns, not many do. Of those that do, most invest far less than Woodford. WHAT ARE REGULATORS DOING? One of the ways in which Woodford was able to keep below this cap was through some of the private companies in which he held stakes listing partially on the stock exchange in Guernsey. The FCA, which authorises Woodford, said it will look at how the fund applied this EU cap and whether the rules on applying the cap need toughening up. FCA Chief Executive Andrew Bailey wrote in a column in the Financial Times.
By holding Guernsey-listed preference shares, Woodford's Authorised Corporate Director is able to class them as listed rather than unlisted assets, for the purpose of the EU rules. Over the last three years, four of the firms in which Woodford invested have issued preference shares on a stock exchange in Guernsey, although none have traded. Woodford's holdings that have Guernsey listed preference shares include a stake in medical data technology firm BenevolentAI, which was valued at nearly 200 million pounds at the end of April. In Britain, many retail investors pick where to invest by using an online platform, the biggest of which is run by Bristol-based Hargreaves Lansdown. Hargreaves, like other platforms, charges clients a fee each year based on how much money they invest. It uses its financial muscle to negotiate a reduced fee with managers like Woodford and then makes a list of funds it thinks are the best picks. In the case of Woodford, Hargreaves has consistently championed his long-term performance track record and only removed his Equity Income Fund from its 'Wealth 50' list of top picks on the day it was suspended.
Hargreaves Lansdown, the Bristol-based financial services provider, is to acquire 6 per cent of JP Morgan Asset Management's individual client accounts. About 7,000 clients and £370m in assets will be transferred to the Hargreaves Lansdown Vantage Service as part of the agreement. JP Morgan is to stop offering FTSE equities and other non-JPM investments to direct individual clients and will cease to provide the JP Morgan SIPP and the JP Morgan Cash ISA. The changes affect about 6 per cent of its client accounts, 7,000 out of more than 126,000 individuals. Following a rigorous selection process, JP Morgan Asset Management selected the Hargreaves Lansdown Vantage Service for its industry-renowned client service capabilities and ability to accommodate all of the different types of client investments.
No more are heaters and ACs considered a luxury; these days, it's become a basic necessity in every home. Contrary to perception, AC installation is just the first step; there are several aspects you have to cater to. But that’s not all because, in addition to maintenance and installation, AC repair in San Diego is also a very important aspect to be taken into consideration. Irrespective of whether you’ve just bought a split AC for your home or looking to install a centralised air conditioning system in your office, contracting a reputed repair company can be one of the best investments you make. But you might wonder -there are so many companies offering repair services of this kind, how do I know which one is better than the other? Yes, it can be confusing which is why you should look out for certain things in these companies.
It would be very unwise of you to hire companies that have practically no experience in repairing air conditioners. Look out for companies that have been in the business for several years. Yes, it's true that several years of experience doesn't always account for quality services but then again, being experienced gives people peace of mind. There’s no telling the fact when electrical appliances will break down. It can be hot summer night and your air conditioner stop working. What will you do? You can’t possibly stay up all night, drenched in sweat, right? Precisely for this reason, always hire repair companies that are available 24x7, be it during the morning or middle of the night.
You don't want to hire a company that provides just one kind of services. Suppose you have a contract with a particular company, but suddenly you find that the company doesn’t provide the kind of repair you are looking for your air conditioner, what will you do? The only possible solution is to hire another company for it, but wouldn’t that be an added expense? Precisely for this reason, always look out for companies that offer a wide range of services. If you are hiring a company for San Diego AC repair for the first time, there’s no way to tell what kind of service you will receive.