Interesting article from Sydney Morning Herald, The Dirty Secrets Of Financial Planners.
Obviously from this the only financial planners worth using are fee per hour ones who can disclose they take no fees from financial product providers.
Plus the mess from Storm Financial and similar would have highlighted these issues.
Well since I got the house the share market has been on a crazy ride, mostly downward. Though I would be happy to go along for the ride, buying for the long term rather than the current market value, having the margin loan forces me to keep an eye on this so I’m selling down to minimise (or eliminate) my LVR so I can focus on a slow but sure periodic purchases of index funds rather via dollar cost averaging rather than having to keep an eye on my LVR.
Australian Power and Gas - listed on the ASX - have 10% green product.
Victoria Electricity - owned by Infratil - which is listed on NZ stock exchange - have 10% green product.
ActewAGL - owned 50% by Singapore Power and ACT govt? .. hard to tell because of the vague wording on the web site.
Origin Energy - ASX listed
Overview here:
http://www.greenelectricitywatch.org.au/
Additional comments in an article from Neerav Bhatt’s blog:
http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/dont-get-tricked-into-choosing-fake-greenpower-electricity/
Right now tending towards Origin - even though I left them for TXU a while back because one of their door to door sales people was harassing me at home when I was home from work very sick.
Jack Green looked OK but then I read this story of fairly crappy service from them.
A long time ago I wasn’t impressed with Westpac, so I moved my banking somewhere much better. I also switched my credit card to a product that seemed better at the time, Virgin Mastercard. Now I read (yes I know this is month old news but I just found it now) that Virgin is selling their Mastercard business in Australia to Westpac. Further news from The Age on this here.
No big deal, I guess I’ll just move my credit card over to Bendigo Bank which is supposed to have an excellent credit card product anyway, plus me being a Bendigo bank shareholder I’m kinda sorta putting the fees back in my own pocket.
Also on a similar note if St George Bank get gobbled up.. my St George Bank shares will become Westpac shares and my St George margin loan will end up owned by Westpac.
I just purchased a copy of A Random Walk Down Wall Street which is one of those books I have heard the general gist summarised by others, and agree with what I have heard of this gist.. but never actually read. Ordered from Etrades Moneybags site, though it hasnt showed up yet.
But also while poking about I found this “readers digest” summarised version which appears to boil it down to the key points, available as a PDF file.
From the Vanguard email newsletter, which sometimes has some quite interesting info although I am not currently a Vanguard customer
It’s time in the market that counts Australian share market volatility 1978 -2008
Guess demonstrates even with volatility shares do OK as long as you take a long term view.
Really the news says it all.. I’m GLAD I never heard of these guys when I was choosing my margin loan.
I haven’t been able to find any definitive word on what protection banks offer to peoples savings in Australia - now it looks like not much:
Link: Is your bank deposit safe? No - but it could be
For a long while I presumed they were, mainly from reading US and UK info on banking, where bank deposits are protected, at least up to $100K in the US, or 35K pounds in the UK. But now it seems clear there is no despit insurance for Australian banks.
Though I have a buy and hold policy time to stop buying parcels of shares every so often and just put some cash into the margin loan to keep the LVR on an even keel until it settles down a bit while I focus on boring house hunty stuff.
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