Portfolio composition

[Snoopy]

I have a considerable share portfolio containing a mixture of shares, ETFs investment trusts locally and globally. This is my hobby to administer. I have retired and now becoming concerned that if I was not around my wife or daughters will have no interest in administering and maintaining this type of portfolio. Of course I could hand it over to a full broker but the fees I would find hard to justify. The alternative is to simplify the portfolio and have a handful of ETFs. I would be interested to know how others handle this for the long term.

Voltage, brokers will charge different fees depending on what service they offer you. You don't have to go the whole hog and have a full quarterly rebalance every quarter at full service fee level. You could start with an instruction only oversight (i.e. acting on your instruction). That should be much cheaper. If neither your wife or daughters have a particular aptitude for managing investments, then at some stage down the track the portfolio could move to a more 'fully managed' level.

You might start with putting just a small portion of the portfolio of what you own under 'broker management'. Find a broker, more towards your daughters' age group than yours. Then introduce your wife and daughters to them to see if they are comfortable with dealing with that person. Your wife and daughters don't need to be investing experts themselves. But it would be helpful to build up their knowledge to the extent they know what questions to ask. If this broker in tandem with you are able to explain to them why you have structured your portfolio the way you have, then hopefully they will figure out, for example. that panic reacting to every short term itch or TV headline is not the way to manage an investment portfolio.

Once they learn to trust a competent broker, this should take a lot of worry out of their heads in the future, and yours right now.

Also, is there a point to have investments in a trust?

If the ETFs you own in your own name are overseas domiciled - possibly. Although NZ has abolished death duty, it still exists in the UK and USA, for example. So you may find your estate gets stung by overseas jurisdictions if the lawyers have to write to a registry overseas and say you have died and can you please transfer those shares to your wife's or daughters' names. By owning overseas shares in the name of a trust all the transfers of ultimate ownership can be done within NZ.

SNOOPY