Financial Advice. What is it All About?
With new readers to our blog it doesn’t do any harm to highlight the importance of good financial advice. Often we speak to people who do not quite understand the value of financial advice.
At the end of the day Independent Financial Advisers can access pretty much the same “products” as each other.
The difference is why they do what they do and what is the process to reach those decisions?
As you may know by now most modern financial products (Pensions/ISA/Bonds) are pretty generic with only perhaps the new technology on platforms or “wraps” being different.
(A wrap is a consolidated platform where we can hold all of your investments, Pension, ISA, bonds, etc in the one place)
With this in mind what should you be looking in when seeking financial advice?
The adviser should put you front and centre of everything that they do and the financial advice should revolve around your goals and objectives with a reference to some of the solutions.
Financial advice has been for many years built around the myth that investment portfolios are the be all and end all, backed by the huge industry that is investment management.
Any good financial adviser will tell you this is simply not the case.
Without proper planning, research, advice and regular reviews an investment portfolio is not going to help you achieve your goals.
In fact if you don’t value the financial advice a long term relationship with can provide, then soon there will be Robo Advisers (which we have touched on before) arriving from America, so you can take that route.
Investments will form a part of most plans we create but it will only be one of a number of tools we can use to help get you to where you want to be.
Whether it is Tax and IHT, Pension Freedoms, Business and Family Protection, Long Term Care or anything else, you will need really good financial advice.
Over the next few while I am really going to go back to the basics of financial advice and expand on some of the key areas your adviser should be addressing from Knowing Our Client, Risk, Suitability and Regular Reviews.
Something else you may not be familiar with is cash flow modelling. This is at the heart of any financial plan.
I hope you will find this useful and please feel free to contact us should you have any questions at all.
As a footnote please feel free to share this with anyone you think may find this interesting.