We always follow a six-step approach to helping our clients to achieve their financial planning goals and objectives. We thought you might like to understanding our thinking behind each of these steps.
Step one is to spend time with our client asking them a lot of questions. Some of those questions are factual; in fact we refer to this process as ‘fact finding’.
Most importantly many of our questions are about feelings and attitudes. This is because it is simply not possible to deliver bespoke financial planning advice unless we have a really good understanding of our client.
After all you probably wouldn’t have much confidence in anyone who claimed to have the solutions you need but couldn’t be bothered to properly find out about you.
Step two is to carry out research about any existing financial products and arrangements that you have. We obtain authority letters from our clients and invest a good deal of time and energy in gathering a lot of detail about existing financial products.
Our administration team is very skilled at obtaining, storing and interrogating data. Our paraplanning team are highly skilled at analysing products and testing them for continued suitability.
By completing steps one and two, we are able to move onto step three. All of our clients receive a financial planning or advice report. Not only does this document our research and analysis, it most importantly documents our specific recommendations to you.
Having a permanent record of how we arrived at our recommendations provides you with a useful audit trail. It also gives you the opportunity to ask and have answered any questions that you may have.
Step four is to provide you with specific recommendations. At one end of the scale you may need to do little or indeed nothing at all. It may well be that you already have in place the necessary and suitable financial products to achieve your goals and objectives.
Sometimes our recommendations are to adjust your existing financial plans, perhaps by switching investment funds. Other times we might recommend more radical changes, such as transferring to a new plan provider. Whatever we recommend we will provide full details and justification.
We are wholly impartial and independent, not influenced by any commission or any ‘soft’ payments from a product provider. Step five is that we select products from the whole of the market. Price, financial security and service dominate our thinking when we select the most suitable pension or investment for you.
Step six bring our six steps round to the beginning again. We believe strongly in reviewing plans on at least a yearly basis, sometimes more frequently than that.
Our process ensures that we deliver exactly what our clients are looking for. The whole process sometimes takes several months to complete. Attention to detail along the way is absolutely vital to ensure our clients get really good value for money.
