Not All Plain Sailing

You may have invested in one or more life assurance bonds (also referred to as Investment Bonds, Capital Investment Bonds, Distribution Bonds, Property Bonds, With Profit Bonds etc) either through us or another adviser. This particular entry on the Arch Blog is designed to encourage you to let us review these for you.

Until a few years ago we often recommended the use of life assurance bonds as these provided a number of tax and other benefits to a broad range of clients. Whilst we will still recommend these to certain clients the number of situations in which we do so has narrowed considerably. In many cases we will now recommend moving your money to another type of investment and we simply charge an administrative fee for arranging this for you.

A change of tack

Reviews are essential in many aspects of our lives and none more so than our financial planning. Changes to our personal and financial circumstances and to tax legislation can act as strong winds to blow us off course. To continue the nautical metaphor we sometimes need to change tack to continue to follow a route that will help us reach our destination.  Forgive the nautical expressions but I have just returned from the PIMS Forum which is a conference for the principals of 190 of the top independent financial adviser firms in the country. Unusually the conference is held aboard the P&O Cruise Ship Aurora and we sailed from Southampton and lay at anchor off Guernsey for three days. It’s just work, work, work being a financial adviser!

In fact, I not only had five seminars to attend every morning but I had a solid series of 30 minute one-to-one meetings with senior executives of product providers from lunchtime until early evening. The photo is of me meeting with Fay Goddard, CEO of the Personal Finance Society. The seminar programme not only included discussion groups led by fellow IFAs but a varied group of excellent speakers from other walks of life. These included Dr Donald Sull of the London School of Economics, a global authority on how companies compete effectively in turbulent markets; Michael Tipper who came second in the World Memory Championships and showed us how to improve our memories; Austrian orchestral conductor, Christian Gansch, who through practical demonstrations of his art showed us when to lead and when to follow; and Californian psychologist, Dr Maria Nemeth who taught us about mirror neurons; and for light relief, England cricketer and TV personality Phil Tufnell.

Review your life assurance bonds

We have produced a new Guide which looks at a number of reasons why yesterday’s advice to invest in a life assurance bond should now be reviewed. For the present we are happy to review your bond(s) and, if appropriate, surrender them and reinvest the proceeds in a risk-rated portfolio, which will be professionally managed and rebalanced quarterly on the Nucleus Wrap. This service is currently available for a fixed administrative fee whether you are an existing client or not.  It is particularly important that we carry out a review if you have a With Profits Bond as this year represents one of the best opportunities for large numbers of people to exit such bonds without a termination penalty.

You can obtain a copy of our Guide: Review Your Life Assurance Bonds from our website at www.arch-fp.co.uk/review_your_life_assurance_bonds.php and either read it there or download it to your computer.

If you would like to receive advice on your existing life assurance bond(s) or discuss any issue that has been raised by our new Guide please ask your usual Arch adviser, telephone 01483 204600 or email enquiries@arch-fp.co.uk.

This entry was posted on 25/05/2011 at 10:19 am and is filed under Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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