Your services are too expensive: survey

The major reason potential clients forgo your services is cost. That reason was cited by about half of those without financial advisors in a study by the Vanguard Centre for Investor Research.

In Canada, cost was cited by 41% of pre-retirees and 34% of recent retirees without advisors.

Further, about 30% of all respondents without advisors said they didn’t use them because of a lack of trust.

Interestingly, more respondents in Australia and the U.K. — two jurisdictions with commissions bans — cite trust as a reason they don’t use advisors (41% of pre-retirees in Australia, 28% in the U.K. and 22% in Canada).

Read: CSA’s embedded commissions paper focuses on unique Canadian market

Advice gap

In Canada, more than a fifth of retirees (22%) receive no financial advice at all.

That’s a recipe for — among other things — potential tax inefficiency and benefit clawbacks. And only 22% of all respondents say they know how to manage investments in retirement. Further, in a recent poll, Canadian retirees admit to being surprised by costs in retirement, including unexpected high tax bills.

Vanguard suggests the advice gap could be filled by low-cost advice options, additional drawdown tools and multiple online channels, like those for workplace retirement programs.

Read: Do human advisor fees offer more value than robo-advisor fees?

Financial satisfaction

On the bright side, the study indicates that retired clients have high financial satisfaction (65%), perhaps a reflection of some degree of financial planning. After all, more than three-quarters of Canadian retirees (78%) receive some form of financial advice.

Accordingly, 80% are confident in their financial decisions in retirement.

But recent retirees and pre-retirees aren’t so content. Of those who just retired, 43% say they should have saved more, and 34% say they should have started planning earlier.

Overall, pre-retirees express low financial satisfaction (25%), compared to 15% of retirees.

Income sources in retirement

The study finds the most common income sources in retirement for Canadians are:

• government pensions (95% of retirees and 86% of pre-retirees),
• personal savings and tax-advantaged accounts (88% of retirees and 85% of pre-retirees),
• defined benefit pensions (41% and 58%, respectively) and
• defined contribution pensions (32% for both retires and pre-retirees).

Further, Canadians respondents are most likely to expect home equity to be a source of retirement income (58% of retirees and 55% or pre-retirees).

See the study’s Canadian results here. See the full study here.

The Vanguard study was conducted among 5,663 households in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia in October and November 2015. Survey findings may not be representative of the overall population.

Also read: Buffett criticizes high-fee managers in annual letter