Help, guidance and advice

Be serious - free advice, or no-advice is not enough

If you are serious about making the right decisions at retirement you should get expert advice. Although you can get free advice or you might be tempted to use a non-advised broker or investment platform, these services simply do not do enough to ensure you make the right decisions.

Guidance

Guidance is information and help from someone which helps you make financial decisions yourself. Guidance will help you better understand the key issues and the relevant retirement options.

Anybody can provide guidance but is mainly provided by organisations such as Pension Wise or by pension providers. With guidance, you will not receive any financial advice as those providing guidance cannot make specific product solutions or advice you what to do.

Advice

Financial advice is given by a qualified financial adviser who has passed exams, has the relevant experience and is regulated and authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Advice is a personalised service where an adviser will conduct an in-depth analysis of your personal financial situation in order to establish your financial needs and objectives. The adviser will then provide you with a detailed recommendation which may include specific products or solutions.

Pension Wise

You can get free advice from Pension Wise which provides free and impartial information on your retirement options if you have a money purchase pension. Pension Wise can help if you are aged 50 or over, have a personal or workplace pension and want to make sense of your options.

The help and information from some parts of Pension Wise is brilliant but it is only ‘guidance’ and therefore lacks one very important ingredient – it does not tell you what the best solution for you is.

You will be left to make your own decisions. Although you will be given lots of information, this is not enough. You will need help in deciding what options and solution is best suited to your circumstances.

No-advice

There are several no-advice brokers or investment platforms which may appear to offer you a good deal but they are selling something not advising you. With no-advice you must make your own decisions and select your own investments. This may sound easy but in practice it is more difficult than you think.

Get advice

A good adviser will do everything Pension Wise can do i.e. explain all of your options in language you can understand, as well as doing everything a good no-advise broker can do, e.g. get the best deal and in addition, an adviser will make sure you make the right decisions because they are the only people who can give you proper advice.