Hi there, this blog is a series of short essays relating to Financial Planning for you to consider and comment on. With the huge changes that are going on within our industry at present, I thought this would be an appropriate means to get some dialogue going. It doesn't seem that many in the media are interested in this - let's see how it goes.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. ASIC has trotted out its regular review of the 'quality of advice' survey by randomly selecting 64 pieces of advice from around Australia - and extrapolating the results to suggest that Advice is not very professional. Out of the 64 advisers 'checked' (out of a pool of authorised representatives of 15,000), they are able to judge just 2 as 'good'. My issue with this is that the judgment is based purely on the written document and does not provide any guidance as to the real advice offered. ASIC has yet to come up with a suitable methodology of evaluating financial advice and so we seem stuck with this flawed approach. We don't see ASIC broadcasting that 1/3 of their sample of written plans needed to be improved - we see a headline that 1/3 of financial advice is poor. Perhaps under the new limited advice regime, where no written plan is required for many of the guinea pigs sent out to evaluate, we will score f...
Here here. Add to the insurance argument level premiums v stepped, most, if not all retail and industry super funds have stepped premiums whereas, especially for younger poeple, level could be more appropriate. Another issue to consider is the employees of industry super fund who give this advice I assume get paid a salary, paid for by the fund which means all members are paying for advice that only a few get - how is that different to an adviser who gets a commission from all clients but may only speak to a few of them. I say all call centre staff should charge a fee for the advice they provide general or otherwise.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, some research done by an industry fund showed that their members were happy to pay up to $500 for a financial plan - and that virtually none of them took up the offer for an 'independent plan' from IFFP because it was too expensive! This is the result of pretending that advice can be offered for free. Thanks for the comment - hope you follow the blog in the future.
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