The UK personal finance industry has one business model. Your confusion is it.
IFAs charge ongoing percentages because ongoing dependency is the business model. If you understood your finances completely, you would not need them anymore. That is not the business model.
The UK personal finance industry has one business model. Your confusion is it.
IFAs charge ongoing percentages because ongoing dependency is the business model. If you understood your finances completely, you would not need them anymore. That is not the business model.
Your pension provider chose your fund. Not to grow your retirement. To protect themselves from complaints.
When you enrolled in your workplace pension, you were put in a default fund. The provider chose it. Not you. Not your employer.
You can change it.
Have you checked what your pension is invested in?
Most people haven't. Not because they are irresponsible. Because the portal is designed to make it hard.
You have the login details.
You have the twenty minutes.
The only thing between you and knowing what your pension is actually costing you is the decision to look.
What fund are you in?
Here’s what I did when I found this out.
1.Logged into my pension provider
2.Found the fund I was in
3.Googled the annual charge
4.Switched to a lower cost fund
Twenty minutes.
£29,000+ difference.
The new UK tax year started this morning.
£20,000 ISA allowance. Reset. Available now.
Most people will do nothing with it. Here’s why that’s not laziness.
The new tax year is a useful deadline.
But a deadline without clarity is pressure.
The people who actually use the allowance well aren’t more disciplined.
They just know what the allowance is for in the context of their specific situation.
That’s the part nobody teaches.
This isn’t a character flaw.
It has a name. Ambiguity aversion. We reliably choose familiar uncertainty over unfamiliar information, even when the information would help us.
The industry knows this.
It is not especially motivated to fix it.