The issues worrying advice clients

Both AMP Limited and Viridian have been listening to their financial advisers and the bottom line appears to be that while clients are worried about current market volatility and geopolitics, the fundamental issues such as retirement income adequacy prevail.

AMP’s research obtained via its technical service, TapIn, found financial advisers are focused on helping their clients navigate superannuation contribution, conditions of release or withdrawals, transfer balance caps and home ownership issues.

By comparison, Viridian Advisory’s adviser poll pointed to 73% of respondents believing additional support is necessary to help clients navigate the potential implications of geopolitical tensions.

However, the Viridian poll also revealed that 56% of adviser respondents reported no client inquiries concerning the economic climate. Similarly, financial advisers highlighted that sentiments among clients remained stable, with 55% of advisers expressing unchanged or neutral bearish perspectives, while 41% highlighted their clients exhibited a more pessimistic outlook.

Looking at adviser queries, AMP found that almost one in four (24%) questions that AMP received from advisers related to superannuation contributions and dealing with a death benefit, with one in fifteen (6.3%) queries relating to concessional contributions.

Three in 5 (59%) Australians aged 50 and over said they wished they’d started planning for retirement earlier in life and over half (52%) did not know what a retirement income product is.

Almost one in three (31.3%) were extremely concerned about whether they would be able to afford aged care.

In addition to concessional and non-concessional superannuation contributions, the most common topics raised by AMP’s adviser network this year were condition of release or withdrawals (340 queries), transfer balance cap (309 queries), dealing with a death benefit (292 queries) and home ownership issues (228 queries).