The style, content, quality and presentation of personal financial plans varies immensely from financial adviser to financial adviser. So how do you dare to part with your money to enable your financial adviser to produce your initial report?

Well, quite often, financial adviser firms like mine will offer new clients a free initial meeting. This allows you to meet with your potential adviser to see if you could enjoy a long term advisory relationship with them.   The meeting will also allow the adviser to understand what your financial goals and objectives are along with a summary of your current finanical position.

During this initial meeting there is lot of information for you to take on board as you find out about the firm, it’s services, what the services cost, the adviser experience, qualifications and so on. You should also ask them what their personal financial plans look like.  Is it a “one size fits all” or is it bespoke to your own circumstances.  Afterall, this could be the most important piece of work you have ever paid to be done. 

Here’s what ours look like for a typical family that you may have heard of before.

Homer & Marge Financial Plan

Our costs for preparing your initial report start from £500 depending  upon the complexity of your current financial circumstances so please contact us if you would like an accurate estimate andwould like to book your free initial consultation.

High street banks have won their appeal at the Supreme Court over unauthorised overdraft charges.

The Supreme Court ruled in favour of the seven major banks and a building society, which had challenged High Court and Court of Appeal decisions that the charges were unfair and should be subject to regulation by the Office of Fair Trading.

More follows….

SSAS schemes are registered pension schemes that are not regulated by the financial services authority. The members are usually directors or key employees of the sponsoring employer. A SSAS, whilst subject to the same rules relating to contributions and benefits as an insured company arrangement, has considerably greater flexibility and control over the scheme’s investment policies and its underlying assets

One of the benefits of this is that a SSAS scheme can loan back money to the company. This is attractive for the company and the pension fund as the pension fund can release cash on which it was probably getting very little interest into a secure loan, as according to HMRC rules, the loan has to be secured on an asset, at typically a couple of percentage points above base, which is probably much cheaper than any bank funding in today’s market.

a SSAS scheme can loan back money to the company.

Up to 50% of the value of the scheme can be lent to the sponsoring company and the scheme has to charge a minimum of 1% above base. The pension scheme would also need a first charge on an asset for the value of the loan plus interest, though this does not need to be a company asset.

The length of the loan cannot be longer than five years and it cannot be interest free. Assets purchased have to be acceptable assets, but can be commercial property or intellectual property.

Also, loans from the pension fund can be used to buy both physical and intellectual property. With intellectual property, such as a trademark, there will be recurring royalty fees and these can then be paid into the pension fund tax free. for instance, one of our pharmaceutical client companies recently used 50% of the value of its SSAS fund to buy the company’s intellectual property and then the royalty payments were paid back tax free into the scheme.

Over and above providing funding, SSAS funds have one further benefit – they can be converted into a scheme pension, which means at age 75, the company owner does not face the possibility of a potential 80% tax charge as can happen with some self invested pension schemes. A consequence many business owners would be more than happy to avoid.

Whenever I begin to advise a client on their retirement planning it is important that I fully understand their current circumstances.  This often involves dealing with various historic pension funds and benefits all (hopefully) packaged together in a tidy manner for me. However, there is always one ommission and that is details of the State Pension.

The State Pension is the foundation block of your retirement plans.  Whether it forms the majority or minority of potential retirement income it is still valuable.  It can vary quite significantly based on your level of earnings and your employment status (employed, self employed, not employed etc).  I’ve seen State Pensions for this year vary from £91 per week to £164 per week.

Also, you may have noticed a lot of press about State Pensions and extending the retirement age from when you can draw your pension.  This bad news is offset by the return of the link between the State Pension yearly increases and earnings increases.

If you would like to find out the details of your own State Pension then you can request a forecast online here for free.  It will tell you what you have built up so far, when you forecasted State Pension age is and how many more years of contributiong you need to do in order to get the maximum basic pension is.  It will also confirm if you have any entitlement to The Graduated Pension Scheme, SERPS or the more newer State Second Pension (S2P).  It’s only 4 pages long and iit is something you should read well before you plan to retire. 

If you would like any advice on State pensions or your retirement planning then please get it touch.

It has been a tradition of pension schemes for many years that the earliest age you can get at your pension benefits is age 50.  However, about 3 years ago the rules changed to increase that age to 55 but the change was not immediate.  In fact, the rule change wasn’t to come into effect until the 6th April 2010.  I am finding it hard to believe that this is only 7 months away now!!! 

We are experiencing an increased amount of enquiries from clients and prospective clients who are able to access their pension funds now but won’t be able to do so after April 2010.  They are looking at this for many reasons such as early retirement, loss of employment income, home refurbushments and starting up businesses.  Are you looking to release the tax free cash from you pension fund?  Are you affected by the age increase?

We can advise you on all the different ways you can receive benefits such as an annuity, open market option, phased retirement, income drawdown, 3rd way annuity, with profit annuity etc.  Contact us now for more information and to book your free initial consultation. голова болит секс голова болит секс голова болит секс голова болит секс голова болит секс

Do you want to save money?

We undertook a study recently to see the merit in clients paying a monthly fee for our advice rather than us earn commission when we sell a financial product such as a personal pension. We looked at different types of clients (age, sex, earnings, wealth) and found that just on cost it was mainly beneficial for clients to pay a monthly fee.

Take an average couple who are both 40.  They have life cover of £250k costing £42.28 per month, save £200 per month into a pension which is projecting a fund of £140k at age 65 and they save £100 per month into an ISA.

If they were a fee paying client of ours and we set up identical products the life cover would cost £31.86 per month, the pension fund would be projecting a value of £150k at retirement and they would not suffer an initial cost of 5.25% on every ISA contribution they made.  By the age of 65, purely on cost they would have saved £14,701 in charges against a fee of say £30 per month.  A net saving of over £5000.00

This doesn’t even take into account the ad hoc phone support we provide, the annual review we carry out with our fee paying client to try to improve fund performance, maximising all  cash saving returns, improving their mortgage rate, investing their baby’s Child Trust Fund voucher from the government and genral financial guidance on meeting their lifestyle goals.

We aim to make you money, save you money and save you time and I think the above example demonstrates how we can save you money.  Call us now to arrange a consultation to see how much we could save you.

At last!  Safeguarded Rights are now only a distant memory in the world of pensions.  This badly thought out and inappropriatley named type of pension fund is now to be brought in line with the rest of Contracted Out pensions funds.

The Pensions Act 2008 (Abolition of Safeguarded Rights) (Consequential) Order 2009 (SI 2009/598) removes references in pensions secondary legislation to safeguarded rights – eleven SIs in total are modified. Safeguarded rights arise when a member’s rights in an occupational or personal pension scheme which is contracted-out of the state second pension are shared on divorce or dissolution of a civil partnership. PA 2008 s.100 and the related repeals in Schedule 11 Part 2 abolish safeguarded rights altogether with effect from 6 April 2009. From that date, shared rights that derive from contracted-out rights will be treated in the same way as other shared rights.

And the best news is that if you are a policy holder who owned a Safeguarded Rights fund or were about to receive such a pension fund through your divorce then you are now able to take 25% of the fund as a tax free cash lump sum.  Thi sis subject to the normal rules surrounding all pension such has a earliest retirement age of 50.

Call me now if you want to discuss your Safeguarded RIghts in more detail.

Standard Life is to remediate all customers who lost money after the revaluation of its Pension Sterling fund last month (January), at an estimated cost of £100m.

With the level of interest you earn falling on cash savings accounts with bank and building societies by about 75% you might be facing the prospect of not enough income to meet you expenditure.  Of course, you could cut back on what you spend or even start using some of the capital but how long are you prepared to do this for?

In the world of investments, the more you want and the quicker you want it the more riskier the scheme tends to be.  We are not talking about 100% return/100% loss on the spin of a roulette wheel though.

By careful analysis of your income requirements and the level of risk you would be comfortable with (non, minimal, minimal to low, low, low to medium, medium etc.)  We can carefully advise you on both the most suitable style of investments scheme (ISA, Bond, OEIC, Unit Trust) and the most suitable underlying asset classes (Gilts, Fixed Interest, Corporate Bond, Equities etc.)

We have many years of experience in the area of investing for income and a number of satisfied clients.  If you would like to discuss you requirements with us then please contact us for a free initial consultation.