7th October 2013

Scottish Life: Five GRIPs, one birthday

There was an important milestone at Scottish Life recently. Not too long ago our quintuplet of Governed Retirement Income Portfolios turned one year old.

Launched on the 28th August 2012, the five Governed Retirement Income Portfolios, or GRIPs for short, were developed exclusively to meet the needs of customers taking regular income from our Income Release product. 

Each GRIP invests in a mix of equities, property, index linked gilts and corporate bonds and are constructed using Scottish Life funds managed by our sister company Royal London Asset Management (RLAM). Like quintuplets, they may look similar, dress the same way, but dive a little deeper and each has their own personality and traits. 

Whilst being driven by long term benchmarks, the GRIPs benefit from the ability to make tactical calls to take advantage of short term market opportunities, or to help adjust the risk being taken within the portfolios in adverse conditions.

Have they behaved?

All this theory is good and well but how have the GRIPs fared over their first year of existence? 

Looking at a simple example of a £100,000 initial investment and taking an income of £500 a month over the year, we can see how well the GRIPs have behaved (click image to enlarge):

Looking at GRIP 1, the lowest risk level out of the GRIPs, we can see that after taking £6,000 from our £100,000 investment, we end the period with over £97,000 still invested. 

At the other end of the spectrum we have GRIP 5, which ended the period with over £108,000 still invested.

Customise your GRIP

It is possible to bespoke your chosen GRIP with an equity fund, or funds, of your choice. This includes our new, Rathbones Global Alpha fund. 

Rathbones, a discretionary fund manager, bring a wealth of experience of generating alpha within a risk controlled environment. 

Add this to the GRIPs objective of delivering growth above inflation to support regular income withdrawals, whilst taking a given level of risk and you have a powerful combination for your clients. 

We're helping to take the sting out of income drawdown

Our 5 GRIP's are available exclusively through our income drawdown product – Income Release.

View our full suite of drawdown tools and support materials and find out how we can help you take the sting out of advising on income drawdown.

Published September 2013
5W1573/1

Investments, Retirement