So, joy of joys, we’re not in a recession. Or have ‘narrowly avoided’ one, although ‘we’re not out of the woods yet’, according to Chancellor Safe-Hands-Hunt. Now in the not-always-so-good old days, recession pretty much always meant unemployment. For advisers, that meant clients cancelling savings, pensions, life insurance and mortgage endowment (remember them?) plans, having to pay back commission and perhaps going out of business themselves. Now that commission has gone, that’s much less of a worry. Most of the remaining population of advisers look after those that already have money and what happens in the UK economy has relatively little effect on their businesses. It’s global stock markets which worry us more. When they fall as they did last year, fewer people want to invest and those that are invested become far more cautious. But what that does mean is that, unless the way we do things changes, there will be far fewer people who ‘already have money’ for the next generation of advisers to advise.
“Letter of authority: Why now is the right time for change”
This may sound like a non-issue from outside the world-of-financial-advice bubble. It is the bain, however, of the daily working lives of many of us, particularly of those paid by we advisers to do the dirty work of dealing with the many providers with whom we have to work.
