6 SIMPLE STEPS TO FINANCIAL PLANNING

The first step in the process is to establish where you are at the present time. Most of this can be done through a client questionnaire, which I will be happy to e-mail to you for your attention. If you have various existing policies and provide me with the relevant details, I can also e-mail to you draft letters of authority from you, addressed to the product providers, which will state that you have engaged my services so it is permissible for those providers to give me any information that I request on your policies. Once I am in receipt of the completed questionnaire and relevant information on existing policies, and have had the opportunity to analyse it and any other related information that you provide, I am ready for the next step.

The next step is to converse with you for between 30 minutes and 1 hour. As well as allowing me to fill in any blanks relating to the questionnaire, this will help me to find out how you feel about various things which I would not otherwise pick up from a paper questionnaire. During these conversations, I hope to do more listening than talking - see my interview guide for more details. In many ways this is a very important stage in the process, as clients often have not given much thought to where they want to get to in the future, so our conversation can in fact be quite revealing for both parties. Rather than 'lead' clients along down a pre-determined path (e.g. like a sales process), I prefer to ask 'open questions' to help clients discover for themselves what they want. Ideally this conversation should be at a meeting, but if that is not possible due to geographic or other constraints, then over the telephone is normally fine.

I then need to think about things for a bit. I find that financial planning involves quite a lot of thinking, firstly to understand and empathise with my client's circumstances (i.e. put myself in their position), then to consider how their objectives might be met, and whether they can be met, and then to consider the relative risks involved. For me, financial planning is definitely NOT about having some financial product always up my sleeve ready to sell to a client in a flash. For me, financial planning is a much more considered process.

I then put together a financial plan for you to consider. The plan will set out a summary of your current position, your objectives, what I think is achievable and the risks involved. It will then set out a list of action points in order of priority and identify likely costs involved.

Where action is required, I will deal with the necessary paperwork. If the action required relates to arranging transactions in financial services products, independent financial advice will be provided in relation to each individual transaction. You will have the choice of instructing us to either arrange the transaction(s) on a NIL commission basis, or to receive an amount of commission to pay for our fee-based timecosts (with any excess of commission being rebated to the policy to reduce charges).

Once the transactions have been completed, I will agree a review date and then file our papers until that review date falls due. The review date is most often arranged annually, but some clients with circumstances that are less likely to change do ask for longer review periods.

There is a clear cost implication with regard to financial planning, and my charges and those of my personal assistant are based on an hourly rate which is listed in the Key Facts document titled 'About the cost of our services'. As with the purchase of any product or service, clients should consider a cost versus benefit analysis. In my view, our costs represent very good value when you consider the long term benefit of sensible financial planning, plus the savings in tax that are often also identified during the process, plus the peace of mind associated with a greater awareness of your financial circumstances and the real options available to you (i.e. options other than just buying another financial product).

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