David Craig, on November 8th, 2013I’m writing a book on how people sell things to us and so thought I might use the next few days exposing some of the biggest lies that the financial services industry uses to get hold of our money.
We have about £4trn in savings – bank accounts, unit trusts, pensions, annuities and life insurance. Every minute of every working day, the people who have sold us financial products and who manage our money take about £1m. That’s over £400m a day, over £105bn a year. That’s an awful lot of our money going into the pockets of a relatively small group of people.
If we were getting great interest on our savings, if our unit trusts were achieving the mouth-watering growth rates puffed by the ads in the Money sections of our weekend newspapers and if we were all looking forward to financial security in retirement, then giving these people £1m a minute (£400m a day) might be justified.
But the interest on our savings is pathetically low and is below the rate of inflation. So our savings are losing value every minute of every day. Most unit trusts fail to get anywhere near the growth they claim they can achieve. And the poor performance of most pension funds and catastrophically low annuity rates mean many people are in for an awfully sobering financial shock when they reach retirement.
So, I thought it might be worth using the next few days to look at the biggest lies we are told by people connected with financial services as they try to make themselves an awful lot richer at our expense.
Hopefully by exposing these lies, I can help my readers keep more of their money out of the hands of the greedy, self-serving parasites in the financial services industry. (Then maybe a few grateful readers might buy copies of my books GREED UNLIMITED and/or PILLAGED. Or would that be an ask too far?)
Though, if in a few days readers don’t find these helpful, please get in touch and I’ll go back to writing about more controversial stuff.
Tomorrow: Lie number 1 – “Over the longer term, shares outperform cash”
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I’d like to invest my money into the same pot that MPs invest their pension contributions. The growth rates are astronomical.
Re your final sentence: I, for one, am interested.
For further reading (free on Kindle) I recommend “Monkey with a Pin: Why you may be missing 6% a year from your investment returns”, by Pete Comley.
The industry is even more corrupt and dishonest than I had realised although there does seem to be a few tentative signs that the government MIGHT be taking some action (far too late in the day and no doubt riddled with convenient loopholes).