Looking for advice on best way/options to manage investments after death of partner

@neo123
I am useless to you in respect of the questions you ask, but I hope it's ok to express my sympathies to you, your husband and children for the situation you find yourselves in, and equally my admiration for your apparent strength and clarity of thought in the face of it all.

neo123 said:

The CAT one is interesting, from reading the various links, can my husband in theory avail of the 335k allowance now, and the children might additionally be able to avail of up to 335k each before the age of 18?

Click to expand...

Bronte said:

What are you trying to do here. Get 335K from parents to husband now, and later another gift to the children (I belive the limit is not 18 if the children are in full time education up the age of 25)

Click to expand...

Just in case there's any confusion here, there is no opportunity for any individual to benefit more than once from any of the CAT group A/B/C exemption thresholds - they are a one-shot lifetime cumulative limit.

Final point/question on the CAT one for now, is let’s assume for simplicity for a second that all parties (my children and I will all inherit the maximum 335k or more in due course. In this case additional inheritance from the in laws/grandparents at some point won’t have an additional tax benefit (ignoring timing), as it will just mean the later inheritance would be taxable. What does not flow through is my husbands 335k allowance, so there would seem to be potential benefit in him receiving inheritance before his death.?please correct me if I’m misunderstanding something

@ClubMan thanks for that link. It’s exactly how I feel. Do you mind me asking how/where you trade these shares? So if I look at Davy for example it seems there’s a 0.5% annual charge, as well as transaction charges so could head towards 1% for fairly simple buy and hold strategy?

neo123 said:

@ClubMan thanks for that link. It’s exactly how I feel. Do you mind me asking how/where you trade these shares?

Click to expand...

I use E*Trade because I had an account from an employee incentive scheme from years back. I just bought and hold - I don't really trade other than that. There are no ongoing charges. But using E*Trade may give rise to other potential complications:
On the other hand this doesn't bother some (many?) people:

neo123 said:

The layers of costs within insurance products/bonds puts me off but equally it offers easy diversification with perhaps simpler tax situation?

Click to expand...

neo123 said:

I'm not a novice at the how investments operate and have spent my career in insurance companies pricing and structuring some of these products amongst other things

Click to expand...

At some future date, would you mind giving us some more details on this (in a separate post) as it's an issue that comes up a lot on AAM and I don't think we've had someone who is/was involved in pricing some of these products and it would be geat to have that behind the scenes insight on costs/pricing/structure.

Gerard.

neo123 said:

Do you mind me asking how/where you trade these shares? So if I look at Davy for example it seems there’s a 0.5% annual charge, as well as transaction charges so could head towards 1% for fairly simple buy and hold strategy?

Click to expand...

@neo123 sympathies on your situation. Personally use both Interactive Brokers and Degiro as they're far cheaper than any Irish alternatives. Would suggest buying and holding a diversified group of large US/EU companies rather than 1 or 2 conglomerates.

@GSheehy Sure, happy to pull something together. Any particular aspects? I'm a couple of years out from having been directly involved but doubt things have changed much. In summary, it was mainly a matter of figuring out the various layers of costs to make funds available to the product (often multiple layers of costs between asset manager, distributors, some related group companies, plus a bit of margin for the local entity who actually sells the product), and balancing this out with different commission levels/structures to manage advisor driven churn (ie lower initial commissions, offset by higher ongoing trail commissions), all while making sure it's generating enough return on various standard metrics (payback, IRR, NPV), whilst understanding the impact on regulatory solvency of the structures. As described, there are a number of competing components to it, but most of it was playing around in the broker/commission space in my experience. Occasional launch of new funds, or perhaps regulatory change (eg the Solvency II rules, or PRSA changes).

I was always a bit miffed at how UK equivalents were significantly cheaper. I expect it was something to do with additional layers in the product chain, all looking for a cut (a lot of our insurance companies are part of international insurance groups). Might also have something to do with investments environment in the UK where things are much much cheaper, and tax friendly with ISA's, much higher CGT allowances etc. Also ability to trade in stocks directly and cheaply in the UK is much more commonplace, so insurance vehicles just wouldn't compete with the level of charges we tolerate in Ireland. Obviously they benefit from much bigger scale as well, but that's not justification for the cost differences.

@zephyro thanks. I've looked into both of those and they look like real possibilities. Even though i hadn't heard of Interactive Brokers, and their website looks terrible, they are enormous and global. And DeGiro regulated by a few of the more robust European regulators as well, so perhaps that gives some comfort over security. Particularly with segregation of client asset requirements. Obviously nothing is risk-free but I've no reason to believe that just because I'm paying Davy's 0.5%+ for very little, that they'll be any more secure or compliant with the rules.

And agree on your other point as well. I wouldn't intend to do anything fancy at all here aside from directly hold a broad range of equities, and review maybe once a year. I'm certainly not naïve enough to believe i know more about companies or equities than the market, however i'm just not convinced the asset managers do either (certainly not net of the fees that will be charged).