The ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ is happening. Parents with comfortable final salary pensions and houses they may have bought for (in today’s terms) next to nothing, now worth £1m or more, are dying and passing on what they have to far-more-strapped next generations. The worries of a ‘majority of advisers’ are that, as they have grown old with their clients (on average ten years either way in age), that next gen will take their inheritances elsewhere. Which they might of course and the argument is that we should be courting our clients’s kids (more often than not 40 or 50 themselves) so we don’t lose the money. Maybe; but in my view, it will either happen or it won’t. We get as many new enquiries from those who have just inherited as we do clients sadly dying. If you’re forward thinking as a business, perhaps the best option is to the ‘elsewhere’ to which than next gen goes.
“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.
