Independent Financial Advice & Financial Planning

What is it?

“Imagine a puzzle with 1,000 pieces randomly scattered on a table. What’s the single most important piece to solve the puzzle?

The answer is the big picture on top of the box that matters most. This is of course an analogy for Financial Planning, which helps to establish your picture and vision of your future. The small pieces to the puzzle represent your financial policies and Financial Advice helps you piece them all together.”

Financial Planning is your personalised strategy and roadmap to achieving your longer-term goals and objectives. This is your “bigger picture”. This could be financial independence so you won’t have to worry about money, planning for an early retirement or move into a less stressful role, having the time and money to travel more, pursue a hobby or to spend more time with loved ones. You may not have figured out what you want in the future yet, and that’s OK – don’t worry. We’ll help you identify your most important ones first and build on them as we work together over time. It often involves using some fancy software to provide detailed financial projections and forecasts of what your financial future looks like, so that we could “backward engineer” and advise you on what actions you need to take today to best look after your money and assets.

Independent Financial Advice involves ensuring you have suitable financial products and investment strategy to complement your financial plan. These are your “jigsaw pieces” using the analogy above. Whether that involves Investment ISAs to meet your goals, making use of your pension allowances to meet your retirement plans, being tax efficient, having sufficient life cover in place to protect loved ones, or not paying over the odds with your mortgage, and so on.

How we do it

When we meet for the first time, we will explain to you our Four Stage Financial Planning Process.  We take all of our clients through every step of this journey because providing you with a consistently high standard of advice and service is of paramount importance to us.

Who we work with:

We are blessed with having exactly the same number of hours per day as every person in the world. Hence by choice, we limit the number of clients that each adviser can look after to ensure that we have sufficient time and resources dedicated per client. For new clients we onboard, we have a soft-minimum requirement of £250,000 of investable assets that we manage under our Wealth Management Review service.

Our Wealth Management clients are typically:

• Successful business owners & entrepreneurs
• Senior executives
• Contractors
• Trustees or bespoke corporate projects
• Those who have a preference for their investments to be invested Ethically & Responsibly

Quite often our clients will be at these life stages or significant life events:

• Still building and growing wealth towards financial independence
• Approaching and at-retirement
• Already retired and wish to delegate complex tasks to a professional
• Sold business and are considering the next steps
• Looking to leave a legacy and inheritance to loved ones
• In receipt of a large inheritance

Importantly, most clients come to us because they would like peace-of-mind that their wealth is being managed by a professional so they don’t have worry. Our meetings also allow our clients, who all have busy lives, to sit down, review and reassess their long-term goals together (both personal and as a family),  ensure their money and actions are aligned with them.

By working with us you will:

• Have greater certainty and confidence of your financial future;
• Gain financial freedom, control and peace of mind;
• Have a professional who understands you, will work with you overtime and listen to any future plans you may have (big or small);
• Clarity of your longer-term goals and objectives, and the actions you need to take today to stay on track to achieving them;
• Not leave your future to luck or chance;
• Benefit from regulated, professional and independent financial advice.

IFS Wealth & Pensions is both Independent Financial Advisers & Chartered Financial Planners (external link), awarded by the Chartered Insurance Institute, which is often regarded the gold standard in the profession.  Less than 5% of advice firms are Chartered so you can be sure that the advice we provide is of the highest standards. We take no shortcuts in our work.