Making money: what the experts think
Unsung no more
Apart from a few exceptions, such as Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth and David Hockney, modern British artists have been “relatively neglected” by investors, said Carol Lewis in The Times. That’s changing. Investors in their 30s and 40s – priced out of the heavyweights – are “pushing up the prices of lesser-known 20th century British artists”. At a recent Cheffins auction in Cambridge, a painting by the colourist Winifred Nicholson went for £44,000, more than twice its estimate. Other names in demand, according to valuer Brett Tryner, are the painter and textile designer Enid Marx (prices of her lithographs jumped from £650 in 2016 to £4,400 last year), and the artist and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar – who shot to fame when an expert on the BBC’S Antiques Roadshow called one of her unknown pieces a masterpiece.
The cost of advice
Working out whether your financial adviser is offering “good value for money” is a nightmarish business, said Ruth Emery in The Sunday Times. Complicated charging structures, poor data and the “secretive nature of the industry” all combine to befuddle clients – not least because financial advice firms do not have to publish their charges on websites (although they must disclose them before giving advice). “They also employ myriad fee structures, including percentage of asset, flat fees and hourly rates.” When Vouchedfor, a website that publishes reviews of financial advisers, “attempted to lay bare exactly how much clients are charged”, it found a wide disparity in costs. The initial one-off fee for seeking advice, for instance, ranges from 0.5% to 5% of a client’s invested assets. The annual fee, meanwhile, “could be zero – or as much as 2%”.
Solid bargains
As a general rule, initial fees for investment advice “drop sharply the more a client invests”. On average, someone with a portfolio worth £100,000 will pay 2.06%, while an investor with £500,000 would pay 1.24%. Vouchedfor found that the average “total advice cost over five years” for a client investing £250,000 was £12,783. But several firms charging less than that are well reviewed, including Nottingham’s Veracity (£8,750), London’s Money Honey (£6,875) and Newbury’s Griffin Financial Solutions (£10,000).