Here’s more on that self-same Advice Gap. One reason that many correctly think it will become harder, if at all possible to retire is that auto-enrolment pensions will never without attention, provide a comfortable income; if your definition of comfortable is about what you’re earning now. And the paring back of charges, a good thing of course for the pensions themselves, means that advice in the workplace will only be available if a kind employer pays for it. Go figure. This goes hand-in-hand with the demise of final salary pensions, now only available in watered-down versions in what’s left of the public sector. Yes, I know, there are all sorts of reasons for this, mainly the aging population. When they were invented, many of those pensions would only have been paid for 5 or 10 years and now we’re all living longer. That’s a ‘problem’, however, which may self-correct if we don’t sort both pensions and the NHS in pretty short order.
“Will the Consumer Duty lead to an increase in advice fees?”
How we as advisers charge for our services has been the subject of navel-gazing debate in our profession for some time. Should we work on accountant- and solicitor-style hourly rates, charge a fixed subscription or have a menu of tasks and bill you accordingly.
