The end of the tax year is fast approaching, with only today and five working days next week before we finish another fiscal year.
As with the end of every tax year since time began, life is busy right now for financial advisers.
Here at Informed Choice, we always experience an exceptionally busy March, helping our existing clients tie up any loose ends around pension and ISA contributions, as well as ensuring they are behaving in the most tax efficient way with their savings and investments.
We also receive lots of enquiries from new clients, who are keen to engage with us to receive tax-year end sensitive advice.
This year has been particularly busy in this respect, prompted I suspect by the Budget last week and its announcements regarding pensions and ISAs.
This is excellent for a growing business like our own, which has the capacity to work with new clients each month, as well as continuing to provide an excellent service to our existing clients. We do sometimes however struggle to accommodate every last minute request.
Advice takes time. At least good quality advice does.
We never rush the delivery of our advice, because doing so can result in mistakes or a rushed solution which fails to consider all of the options in a thorough, methodical manner.
This is not to say that we will not pull out all of the stops when the need arises, particularly for existing clients who always come first. But for a prospective new client wanting something to happen extremely quickly because the end of the tax year is approaching, we have to be realistic about what is achievable and desirable.
As the end of this tax year approaches, the last new clients we agreed to engage with were at the start of this week, giving us two working weeks to deliver advice and implement our recommendations.
Even this timescale is dramatically shorter than usual, but it can work where the remit is precise, the client is prepared to deliver a lot of information (both initially and once new information requirements are identified) and they are prepared to pay a premium for our services to compensate for the faster delivery.
Over the past 24 hours I have needed to turn away a couple of prospective new clients, who had tax year end sensitive requirements, simply because there was not enough time to deliver our usual standard of service.
I always regret doing this, wanting to work with everyone who is suited to our service and would get value for money from our fees, but in my opinion it is better to deliver no service at all than a rushed service which might not meet our exacting standards.
As we enter the 2014/15 tax year on 6th April, please engage with a Financial Planner as early as possible in the tax year to give them sufficient time to gather information, complete research, prepare recommendations, debate them with you and implement their advice.
Do not wait until the week or two before the end of the tax year to approach an IFA for the first time and then expect a last-minute delivery of advice.
