kevincoghlan

There’s a saying that nothing worth having comes easy. In personal finance, it’s just as true. Put simply: “No Pain - no Champagne”. Nobody accidentally ends up with a chilled bottle of vintage Krug at home. It’s deliberate, it’s earned and it’s a reward. The same goes for financial security. Wealth doesn’t arrive by accident. It’s built through planning, discipline, and deferring some of today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s freedom. The Discipline of Deferral We live in an age of immediacy: one...

Towards the end of the first quarter, the life insurance companies announce high level information about the claims they paid in the previous 12 months and usually they give those numbers some historical context. The primary areas they cover are the core areas of life assurance lump sums, specified illness lump sum payouts and income replacement for individuals who are out of work longer term due to illness or injury. The information is usually supported by webinars and a report and this...

Investment management used to be described in fairly simple terms: passive or active. That distinction still matters, but it no longer captures the full picture. Today, a firm’s competitiveness may also depend on how well it uses AI, and whether that AI is being applied to investing, technology, or client service. A lot of the discussion around AI in finance is still vague. In practice the big firms are using it in three quite different ways and so the same AI label can describe very...