If we give you actual financial advice which results in you doing something which we arrange for you, then we’re giving you advice. If we, as we often do when someone gets in touch whom we can’t really help, ‘point you in the right direction’ and let you get on with it, is that ‘advice’ or ‘guidance’? What’s the difference? Well, that’s what this debate is all about, as if it’s ‘advice’, we carry the can, and shouldn’t have told you anything without fully appraising your financial and probably personal situation and inside leg measurement. Which takes time and will cost you money. If we give you a bit of guidance, you sort it out for yourself, and it goes wrong, whose fault is that? Quite possibly ours; and there’s the rub.
“Why people over the age of 55 are the new problem generation”
I suspect that many a ‘boomer’ might be pleased with the ‘problem generation’ label. When they were teen- or twenty-somethings, their parents’ generation may well have either despaired of them or worried about the world into which they were emerging as adults; it will ever be thus.