Independent Financial Advice

The essence of planning is to understand what you need and what you would like, then how to achieve it with some expert independent financial advice.

In the first part, we believe that you should have an accessible cash fund equivalent to at least 3 months of your normal expenditure.

In the second part, you should have further funds set aside for foreseeable expenditure such as weddings, new car, the World trip, reroof the house or simply bailing out children.

The third tranche is to invest for your long term objectives and building the financial plan to get you where you want to be.

What is a Financial Plan?

“'If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!'.” A quotation from Benjamin Franklin and he is right!

A Financial Plan is the written statement of what is to be achieved and when. It should consider what needs to be done and identify risks to the success of the plan. This could include death of a party to the plan, illness, unexpected expenditure, change in circumstance or investment under performance. The risks should be managed and appropriate strategies put in place.

The financial planning process is in six stages;

1. Determine your objectives and timescale
2. Gather information
3. Evaluation of your current situation
4. Production of a plan
5. Implementation
6. Regular monitoring of the plan

The financial plan or your independent financial advice is individual to you, the client. It is yours to keep and you can choose to implement as much or as little of it as you wish. Clearly there may be negative implications in partial implementation but we will point them out to you.

The process starts by spending time with you. We need to understand you better so we can produce a plan that you can feel is yours and that you can engage with. It needs to encompass not just cold facts but also sentiments and emotions.