Financial advisers should quit if they can’t meet deadline

A very late entry to this conversation, but is it really true that the best builders have no qualifications? I wouldn’t touch one with a ten foot scaffold pole. Building is a highly regulated industry and I’d want to see evidence that those regulations are fully understood – just as I would in an IFA. My experience of long serving no-qualification IFAs is that they are no better than used car salesmen.

What other professionals have no qualifications? Actually that would be me – there are no national standards for software developers. And I’m very careful about who I recruit!

I am an IFA and well on my way to level 4, however my concern is that I have a lot of what I call bread and butter clients who work and may or may not have a mortgage and do not have a lot of disposable income, do not have a lot of savings or surplus money to invest in pensions or savings. These clients still need to be advised on small pension top ups, regular premium savings either via ISA or tax exempt savings etc, these clients will not want nor have the ability to pay me fees. In this case they will either have to take it on themselves and invest without advice or go to their bank which will give money to the very people ho have created a great deal of the financial problems we are in now. I will have to change a lot of my client bank profile as the very clients who I have advised modest pensions and savings, over the last 18 years, who I count a lot of them as good friends, who account for around 95% of my client bank, will not sustain my business. I also read the previous comment ref sometimes financial advice may in effect end with no investment recommendations, this is all well and good but if I spend time with a client at a meeting, then go away and build a recommendation package for the client, that he then says “great but I dont want to do what you say”, is he going to pay me for what I have done. This will be exactly the case for the clients who are not high net worth clients, who have paid fees for years, also the example you gave of £100000 is correct you will earn an high level of commission for that that I would either rebate part of the commission back to the client or let them pay me a fee and rebate the full amount. But what about say an ISA investment, I tell my clients that when doing an ISA this would be more cost effective for me to take commission as this would generate around £200, it would take me around 8 hours minimum to submit the work when you take into acocunt time spent with the client and also the paperwork that needs to be done. I should in effect charge over a £1000 if I were to work at an average hourly rate. I effectively loose money on this work, because I know the client may invest more in the future or I may receive a good client referral, this I can afford to do as future possible commission may make up for the money lost on the ISA. This I will not be able to do post RDR, in effect it will create a group of people that will be left with no financial advisors and we will all be fighting for the high net worth clients, who will pay fees and sustain my business. I have no problem with qualifications at all and welcome these, although I feel that once I have got these, I still may not be able to survive post RDR and may well have to use the qualifactions to find another job!