The fallacy of "lifestyling"

A good adviser should present all of the options to his or her client.

Personally, I would have no interest in an annuity, but I’d be very wary of any adviser who didn’t at least explain it and present a list of pros and cons.
 
Gordon Gekko said:
A good adviser should present all of the options to his or her client.

Personally, I would have no interest in an annuity, but I’d be very wary of any adviser who didn’t at least explain it and present a list of pros and cons.
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This issue is (unusually) not one levelled at the financial advice industry. It is first and foremost an exposure of the very concept of "default" pension plans, which is the opposite of advised pension plans.
This Guardian Article posted earlier by @PMU is compulsory reading. It points to another major "scandal" in the UK pensions industry, this time firmly with the providers themselves. Expect major class actions in that litigious jurisdiction. Did you ask the punter whether they wanted an annuity, when after all very few do? Did you really think zero yielding long bonds were an appropriate investment when the dogs in the street knew better?
 
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I've posted on a separate thread. The arguments are also relevant for this thread.
I hope this link does the trick:

ARFs should not be permitted for AE pensioners

Post 1 What has prompted me to this conclusion is the debate on lifestyling. Lifestyling seems to have bifurcated into the target annuity or the target ARF camps (ignoring the tax free lump sum for this thread). This is a major bifurcation which has come into sharp focus with recent rises in...
www.askaboutmoney.com
 
Maybe if the financial industry was forced to remove buzz words like "lifestyling" and "low risk" from their descriptions and explain things in plain English.
We have learned that investments in bonds are anything but low risk and therefore they should not be allowed to describe a fund as low risk if it is mostly invested in bonds.
"Low risk" funds should have a maximum bond component and that they should be distinguished depending on what they are invested in. For example this is a low risk majority bond portfolio or a low risk predominantly equity portfolio. Just investing predominantly in bonds should no longer qualify as a "low risk " fund.
 
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