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.

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.

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.

What a disaster this is turning out to be.   I speak as an investor, adviser and shareholder. Clients have lost money, advisers feel misled, shareholders worry about management and Standard Life ask for…..patience!!

Forget patience.  If this company was still a mutual organisation (owned by its policyholders) I don’t think it would have ever gone down the route of chasing a fast buck at the beck and call of investors.  And, even it had, I think it would have used its own funds to clean up the mess and financial loss of its wrong decisions and pay a lower bonus to with profit policyholders.

As a result of the wrong decisions I expect no winners.  Clients won’t want to put new money in an organisation whose cash fund loses value,  advisers won’t recommend a company that does not treat its customers fairly and investors will subsequently sell their shares in a less profitable organisation.

So is this goodbye to Standard Life or merely au revior until it changes it decision.  Over to you Mr Crombie.

There are many reasons to start a pension scheme for all or some of your members of staff.

• Your duty as a caring employer to assist in the longer term care of your staff.
• To help attract quality individuals to work in your business.
• To help retain quality individuals who already work for you.
• The Income Tax and National Insurance benefits on contributions you make.

However, there is none more so than you legal obligation to provide a pension scheme if you have 5 or more employees in your business.  Currently there is no legal obligation for the company to contribute but that is changing.

Personal Accounts are expected to appear in 2012 with the likely contribution basis to be set as follows:

Employer 4%

Memeber of Staff 3%

Govermnent 1%

This creates an opportunity for you, the employer, to begin to start contributing now and been seen as a good employer, rather than wait until 2012 when your staff will believe your only doing it because you have to.

Careful advice is required when implementing a new scheme and you should consider the future change in legislation, how you announce the scheme, how you administer the scheme and so on.  Simpson Financial Services are experts in guiding you through all the relevant aspects of setting up a new pension scheme. 

If you wish to arrange an informal discussion please contact us here.

Whenever we see a new client in need of financial advice, or revist the existing financial plan for an existing client, we need to gain a thourough understanding of the current financial circumstances.  This helps us to satisy the Financial Services Authority guideline to financial advisers regarding “Know Your Client”.

If you are wanting us to operate on a fee basis then you may want to collate this information yourself so here is a copy of the form for you to download and print.  Then we won’t have to charge you for us doing it.  It can be posted or emailed back to us before your first visit to our Coventry office.

personal fact find

corporate fact find

One of our areas of financial specialism is providing advice to owner managed businesses and we suggest that both documents are completed by potential clients in this situation.

However, we do require very exact detail about some of your pension, investments, insurances and other benefits so we may still have to write to some of your current product providers directly to obtain this.  The small print in some of those older pension contracts can be quite valuable to you with the passage of time.

Whenever we take on a new client for personal financial planning services the first item on the agenda is a full review of their existing finanical circumstances.  This is where we probe deeply into your employment status and benefits, insurance policies, pension funds, savings, life policies and so on.

As independent finacial advisers (IFA) we are authorised to advise on all your existing plans and policies and make further recomendations from the whole of the market place.

What often surprises me is that clients often are paying for insurance that they are unable to claim on.  For instance, Client x took out a  mortgage when they were employed and is now self employed. 

But what about the redundancy insurance which came with the mortgage?  They had been paying the £34 per month premium for the last 3 1/2 years but would never have been able to claim.

Often we find that new clients are overpaying for their insurance cover.  Client y need a commercial loan for her business and felt obliged (or pressured) to take out key person life cover in case she died.  A good idea but the bank could only sell it’s own insurance which was very expensive.

As part of our advisory service, we were able to provide identical cover with a different insurer giving her a saving of £62 per month.

Do you want to see if you can reduce your monthly expenditure, or even maximise the potential of your current budget.  Call us now to arrange a free initial consultation.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “Professionalism” is the combination of all the qualities that are connected with trained and skilled people.  So raising examination levels must be part of the answer.

Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) has also been part of the answer in that it has actually required IFA firms to look at how they do business and then make any changes to improve the customer experience.  I felt that my own 1 on 1 with the FSA in September 2008 was quality business advice. 

I felt I had had an improved customer experience with them!  I’m almost thinking that a 3 yearly 1 on 1 with the FSA for small firms would be another part of the answer to becoming more professional assuimg that the cost is kept at 2008 prices, £0. 

If we want the kudos of being associated with other professions then IFAs have got to walk the walk.  If that means taking exams, doing quality Continual Professional Development (CPD), developing inter personal skills, running a compliant business, being a great adviser, treating your clients like royalty and so on then so be it.

The end goal for IFAs surely has to be dealing with clients who have sufficient income, assets or liabilities such that they need a more sophisticated level of advice and those clients will be willing to see the value of paying for it.  I think that would reduce my own client bank from 780 clients to 156.

That leaves what we might call “bread and butter” business which might well be best served by “Money Guidance”,  although Money Guidance should have restrictions on types and limits advice it can provide, thus creating an effective advice type filter for members of the public. 

My guess here is that the FSA might do well to listen hard to the likes of the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), Which and Martin Lewis on this subject in order that they create something where there is an actual public need.  Even consider making Money Guidance a Charity like CAB.

Aged 38, owner managed IFA business of 1 adviser and 1 para planner/admin, currently reading AF3 pension planning (page 7 of 66 after two weeks!!) and quietly confident about the future of small IFA firms (or what ever we’ll be called then).

So your thinking about a health check on your finances and wondering where to go for advice and what it involves.  For all new enquiries about our service we provide a free initial consultation at our offices in Coventry.

The free consultation allows you the opportunity to see who we are and where we carry out our business with you.  It also gives us the opportunity to see what we can do for you.  You can do some preliminary checks on our firm on the Financial Services Authority register.  Our reference number is 472031. 

You might be interested in an income an expenditure analysis, claiming back tax paid, planning for you future or protecting what assetts you have already accumulated.  Indeed, most of our clients ask us to advise on all these areas for them.

You will need to bring with you some idea of you current financial circumstances such as 12 months bank statments and details of your current investments, pensions, savings and insurances.  Don’t worry if you don’t have all the specifics at this time.

We look forward to meeting with you.