To borrow a quotation from English Philosopher John Ruskin (1819-1900)

“It is unwise to pay too much…but it is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money…that is all. When you pay too little…you sometimes lose everything… because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing you bought it to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot…it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder…it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that…you will have enough to pay for something better.”

Offshore-Rebates.com is about investment management not about selling funds. Here your broker has established personal relationships with most of the fund managers we deal with, visiting them and communicating with them frequently. We care and want to understand what a manager thinks of the economy and why he may have had a couple of good or bad months. We do not rely only upon last month’s fact sheet or last year’s results.

Offshore-Rebates.com is a discount broker who will typically save you 40% of the cost of buying direct at retail rates from the fund house but it does not set out to compete head to head with those who would seek merely to be the very cheapest provider. We do not aim to compete on price with the huge volume brokerages but equally they cannot compete on personal and individual service with Offshore-Rebates.com. The service and advice you will receive here is more akin to a private bank. It is specifically not aimed at the person who is concerned only with everything at the lowest cost, but at the person who knows they want and knows they need to invest but seeks a little honest guidance through the maze. An experience more like shopping at Harrods or Fortnum and Mason with a discount card than at Asda so to speak.

The difference between Offshore-Rebates.com and a typical online investment fund discount supermarket or warehouse is that here a client is going to receive a very high level of service and personal advice with regard to placing and then looking after you and your assets on an ongoing basis. True you can probably find another financial services website somewhere which will allow you to download the applications and send them off at a slightly lower initial charge, but there you will receive little or no help or advice at the point of sale nor ongoing. In most cases there will be no one to explain if the fund is benchmarked for relative performance to the index, which means it will follow the index down as well as up, or whether the manager concentrates equal attention to protecting the assets as he does growing them. Adding the words “Absolute Return Fund” does not reveal all.

Here we also focus on long term building and accumulation, of portfolios which are truly diverse. (subject to sufficient money available to reach the required spread). This means not only diversifying between strategies but also between asset classes. Buying an equity fund in Europe and an emerging markets equity fund is not diversification.

As part of our client service we have also established access to some excellent funds at modest levels which are unobtainable elsewhere.

You might be interested in articles written by this author online at http://www.expatarrivals.com/article/the-truth-about-off-shore-pensions-0