Financial Planning Process

A personal financial plan to help you to achieve your goals

We believe that having an agreed financial plan and sticking to it is crucial. Many investors have no plan and even when they do have one, they don’t keep to it and then wonder why they fail.

This is why we’ll work with you to create a lifetime financial plan that reflects your short, medium and long term goals and confirms whether they’re realistic.

We often find that people allow emotion to influence their financial decisions. So part of what we do could be described as behavioural coaching, where we’ll help you to stay calm in turbulent markets and keep to your original plan. That way you’ll improve the probability of long term-success.

Our ongoing service reviews and refines your plan as your circumstances change over time. This also enables us to make adjustments to reflect any changes in the economy, legislation or HMRC rules etc.

We follow a tried and tested process to assess your needs and work with you to develop a financial plan that is targeted towards achieving your goals. There’s no charge for our initial meeting as this gives us both the opportunity to see whether we can help you and whether you feel that you would like to work with us.

1. Discovery

During this stage you’ll meet with one of our experienced Planners to discuss what you’re trying to achieve. It also enables you to find out more about our services. We find we can add the most value when we work with clients over the course of their whole lives, to help them fulfil their goals.

2. Research

Having agreed that we want to work with each other, we then go through a detailed process to discover what you want to achieve with your wealth and identify the timescales for your objectives. This involves gathering information about you and any existing investments or policies. At this stage, we’ll require your input to ensure that the plan we design is based on a clear understanding of your circumstances, your feeling about risk, investment and your goals.

3. Confirming the overall plan

Having completed the first two stages, we’ll provide you with a financial model that will demonstrate whether your goals and objectives are achievable. To build this model we’ll need to make a number of assumptions which we’ll agree with you first. We’ll then work with you to refine the model to ensure that the final version reflects the priorities that you have set. This forms the basis of your overall plan.

4. Recommendations

Once we’ve agreed the overall plan, we’ll recommend a strategy that will be targeted towards achieving your goals. We’ll outline the desired asset allocation for your investments, as well as review the structure and suitability of any policies and investments that you have in place. We’ll make all of our recommendations with your objectives in mind and focus on helping you achieve them.

5. Implementation

Once you’ve agreed our recommendations, we’ll make all the necessary arrangements to implement the plan. Our highly skilled and experienced support team will work with you and your Planner to act on your behalf with the product providers, setting up new arrangements and carrying out any changes to existing products that we believe are in your best interests. Once everything is complete, we’ll write to you to confirm this and outline what you can expect from us in the future.

6. Ongoing review and monitoring

Every year you’ll be provided with an opportunity to meet with your Financial Planner to review the progress of your financial plan and make sure that it is still based on relevant information about you and your aspirations. This enables us to check that your existing investments continue to be suitable. If we need to make any changes, these meetings provide an opportunity for us to suggest any modifications or carry out any portfolio rebalancing that is required. You may of course contact us at any time between the annual meetings.

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