Focused financial planning

Our Focused Financial Planning service is for clients who don’t want ongoing, comprehensive financial planning, but instead want targeted advice on a "one off" or ad hoc basis, covering specific aspects of their finances.

Targeted advice can cover a wide range of areas from investment planning and retirement planning to insurance and mortgages. Advice will be provided by highly qualified Financial & Investment Planners, wil be totally impartial and will be provided on a transparent fee basis. You can pick and choose from the various areas of advice and we can tailor a package to suit your current requirements.

Three examples of where our Focused Financial Planning Service can work really well are covered below:

Pension Review

For people still working this could involve analysing what contributions should be made to a personal or employer pension, or it could involve setting up a new pension scheme if one is not available or if it is outdated, inflexible or expensive. Alternatively, if you are like many people with a collection of old pensions that are impossible to keep track of and manage, it may be appropriate to consider consolidating the various pensions into a modern, flexible and cost-effective pension scheme to make this part of your finances easier to manage.

If you are near to retirement you will also need to consider how best to use your pension fund to provide an income in retirement. This decision may involve deciding whether to take tax free cash, whether to purchase an annuity or whether to leave your pension fund invested, perhaps through an “Income Drawdown” or “Phased Retirement” plan. The route you take will have a critical impact on your retirement income and therefore your lifestyle in retirement, making advice at this stage of life an absolute must.

In many ways, people nearing retirement should take advice well before the actual date. This is because there are significant risks of leaving the decision about how to draw benefits until close to the actual retirement date. One especially significant risk is that the pension fund falls in value just before you draw your retirement income. This risk can be mitigated by taking advice a number of years before your expected retirement date and ensuring your pension is invested defensively to protect against losses just before retirement itself.

Estate Planning Review

Many of our clients want to ensure that their assets are efficiently transferred to the next generation, whether during their lifetime after their death. By choosing our Focused Financial Planning Service you will be able to receive advice as to whether inheritance tax planning is necessary and what can be done to ensure assets are passed to the desired beneficiaries in a timely and tax efficient manner.

Our planning may also involve arranging for life insurance and pension plans to be placed under trust to maximise the tax efficiency of these arrangements and ensure that their value is passed to the intended beneficiaries quickly and efficiently. We can also advise across the full range of Inheritance Tax planning solutions such as Whole of Life Assurance, Loan Trusts, Discounted Gift Trusts, Business Property Relief portfolios, Potentially Exempt Transfers and Chargeable Lifetime Transfers.
If you or your beneficiaries are non-UK domiciled, special consideration needs to be given to estate planning due to the potentially punitive Inheritance Tax regime that can apply to non-domiciled individuals, especially those who are married.

A full Estate Planning Review would involve analysis on all of these options and then if it were advisable to set up an insurance policy or investments, we can help arrange this for you. We will quote you a fee for the work involved and offset all commission received against this fee.

Insurance Review

Even if you don’t want or need advice on your wider finances at this stage, almost everyone should consider what would happen in the event of a personal disaster such as death or illness.

It is all well and good planning for the future and it would be nice to think that our dreams can all be fulfilled, however, this is not always the case as much can go wrong during our lifetimes. We may become ill and unable to work or could be made redundant. Alternatively we might want to make provision for our families in the event that we die prematurely.

As part of an Insurance Review, we will review any existing insurance arrangements you have, including those provided by employers. This will ensure that your overall personal disaster plan is integrated and effective should the worst happen and it is needed.

We will also provide recommendations and help arrange competitive new insurance cover if required.

Please call us on 0845 602 7875 quoting ‘Focused Financial Planning’ and we will send you a complimentary Information Pack including our Rate Card which explains our current fees. Alternatively, please click here>> to send us a request or message.