Investments:
With the guidance of an independent financial adviser, you’ll gain a clear understanding of your investment options, allowing you to compare and make well-informed decisions that align with your unique circumstances and preferences.
How your wealth is invested is crucial to the success of your financial plan. To ensure your plan is as strong and adaptable as possible, we’ll focus on growing your wealth steadily, without exposing you to unnecessary risk.
Building and maintaining the right investment strategy is key to securing your financial future. Whether you’re investing for income or growth, we offer expert advice, tailored investment solutions, and ongoing support to help you achieve your financial goals. We’ll consider your personal circumstances, tax opportunities, future tax outlook, risk tolerance, and capacity for loss to ensure your plan is designed to work for you.
Through investment, you have a much greater potential for growth than by leaving your money in a savings account. In the current economic climate, you could be losing out by keeping your money in a savings account because inflation is beating the return on interest rates and, therefore, the real spending power of your money is less.
Investment can enable you to match or even beat inflation and help you reach your long term financial goals, but it’s important to understand that, in order to do this, you are introducing the risk of loss to your money.
When you invest, you encounter what is known as a risk/return pay off. Traditionally, the greater the risk you take with your money, the greater the potential for growth.
But, with this, comes an increased chance of losing your money. Before even considering investing your money, you need to be fully comfortable with introducing the potential for loss.
No investment is risk free and if you simply can’t reconcile that there are no guarantees with investment and that you could, potentially, lose some of your money, you are not ready to become an investor.
What to consider before investing?
It’s important to have a clear goal for your investment, whether that’s generating extra income, growing your capital, funding home improvements, or saving for a luxury holiday. Defining your goal helps you plan effectively for both the short and long term.
What are your financial goals?
It’s important to set a clear goal for your investment. Are you looking to grow your wealth? Generate income? Do you have a specific target for how much you want your money to grow, or a minimum income that you need from your investments?
Understanding your goals will help determine the level of risk you need to take. Even if your investment is more open-ended, clarify what you want your money to achieve. Consider your short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals, as this is a crucial step in our advice process with you.
What’s your time frame?
Once you’ve defined your goals, determine how long you have to achieve them. This will help you understand what kind of returns you need and if your goals are realistic.
Take factors like your age and health into account. For short-term goals (less than five years), cash savings are a better choice. A Best Rate cash ISA is ideal for this, but avoid investing in volatile assets—if your investments fall, you may not have time to recover before needing the money. For medium-term (five to ten years) and long-term goals (10+ years), investment is more suitable. However, as you get older, some investments might become less suitable, especially if you’re retired and have less time to recover from losses.
Understand your attitude to risk
It’s crucial to understand your risk tolerance and how much you’re willing to take on. This can influence both the length of time you invest and the goals you set.
If you aim for significant growth in a shorter period, you may need to invest in riskier assets. But if the potential risks are too much for you, it may be necessary to adjust your goals. Learn more about how to assess your investment risk by reading our guide.
How much can you afford to invest?
Be honest about how much you can realistically invest. Review all of your financial obligations, such as debts, insurance premiums, pension contributions, savings, and living costs, to determine how much disposable income you have.
Remember that investing is a long-term commitment, so try to avoid needing to access the funds prematurely, as doing so could limit their growth potential.
Seek financial advice
Managing investments is a complex task best left to those with experience in the markets.
By seeking financial advice, you’ll have the opportunity to discuss all the points mentioned above and ensure your investments are tailored to your specific needs. Check out our guide on choosing a financial adviser to explore the best options for getting expert investment advice.
Our Advice Process:
STEP 1: Initial Meeting
To help us learn a bit more about you and how we can help, we have a short, initial meeting to get known each other a little better. It is also your opportunity to decide if we are right for you, helping you understand our service, the likely costs and agree next steps. This can be carried out over the phone or face to face.
STEP 2: Fact Find Session
During the meeting we will discuss your current situation and what you would like to achieve over the coming years. We’ll discuss your existing savings, investments, pensions and current debts. This part of the process is where we can really get to know you and start to create a plan for your future.
STEP 3: Presentation Meeting
This next step will provide you with a full review of your finances as well as an action plan and investment proposal to help improve your position and address any concerns. There is usually between 2 and 6 weeks between the Fact Find Session and Presentation meeting depending on the complexity of your situation and the amount of time required to prepare all the relevant paperwork. We will always ensure that we minimise this time where possible without compromising on the quality of our work.
STEP 4: Implementation
After the Presentation Meeting the next step is to implement the agreed plan of action. Most of this falls on us to arrange however there may be paperwork or signatures required from you along the way. During this stage we will keep you updated regularly and confirm once all the agreed points have been successfully actioned.
STEP 5: Check-in
This is a little check-in call, usually 6 weeks after all of the implementation process has been completed to make sure you are happy with your new plan and also answer any questions you have.
STEP 6: Annual Review
Life has a way of throwing unexpected events your way, which can derail your plan if they’re not addressed. Plus, your goals and priorities may shift over time. That’s why it’s essential for us to meet regularly to keep your plan on track. Before our meeting, we’ll reach out to see what’s changed in your life and if there’s anything specific you’d like to discuss, including any new priorities or concerns. During the meeting, we’ll revisit your goals, review investment performance, and explore tax planning, before focusing on your plan and discussing your future. Afterwards, we’ll provide a new action plan for both of us to work on.
The performance of your investments is subject to risk(s). Its performance may fluctuate based on movements in the market and economic condition(s). Capital at risk. Currency movements may also affect the value of investments. You may get back less than you originally invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of the future performance. Tax treatment is based on individual’s unique circumstances
