Investing for the future is about TIME not timing.

I am reviewing two clients “retirement options” at the moment. It has struck me that both of these people got fantastic advice from two financial advisors many years ago. One was my dad Michael and the other was from a Dublin financial advisor now since retired. I was thinking today it is important to let people know the importance of sound financial advice and how critical it is to your long term financial planning. Here are the details.

Male aged 75.

In 1984 when I as only a young man my Dad Michael was a very active Financial Advisor. He met with a self-employed client we will call David (not his real name). He advised him to invest 3,000 punts into a Standard Life pension. This off course was a lot of money in those days and he was obviously doing this for the valuable tax relief available as well for long term investment reasons. Well the client has now reached aged 75 and has decided to take his retirement options. I arranged his retirement papers from Standard Life and to my astonishment his maturity value was €69,000 and was invested in their “Managed Fund”. NOW that’s what I call great advice and also excellent investment management from Standard Life who in my opinion were always a top class Insurance company.

Male aged 66

In 1978 this client we will call Tony (not his real name) joined his staff pension scheme. He came into my office recently to say he has long since left his employer and he also advised me his advisor has retired. He said he had received retirement documents in the post from Phoenix (now part of Standard Life0 offering him his retirement options. He asked me to advise him as he did not understand the details. I took some time to review his options. His value was €94,000 and he was being offered a guaranteed pension for life of €10,600 per annum which equates to annual return in excess of 11% per annum. This is guaranteed for the rest of his life. This client was thrilled to find this out as all he had to live on now was the state pension of €240 per week.

Please note a lot of old pension policies had these guaranteed annuities. Unfortunately, these are not available anymore when taking out a new policy.

The power of compounding cannot be underestimated when investing for the long term.

Investing for the future is about TIME not timing.