We are independent financial planning experts.
We believe that financial planning is not just about ticking boxes and putting money in to a pension, an investment portfolio or a protection product.
Financial planning is a far more holistic and ongoing process which can help you make sensible decisions about money that can help you achieve your goals in life.
There are just six simple steps to effective personal financial planning:
Initial Meeting & Fact-Find
We will take time to find out about you and your financial situation. Equally, we will explain how we work and how we can help you. This stage usually involves a face to face meeting where we will establish and understand your needs and objectives. You may have some very specific ideas of what you wish to achieve or alternatively, you may simply just wish to ensure that ‘everything is alright’ in terms of your finances. If relevant, we may also discuss your investment experience and risk profile.
Research & Analysis
This ‘behind the scenes’ part of the process is vital to your financial plan. At this stage, we will research any solutions required, as outlined during our initial meeting. We will analyse your existing plans to ascertain their suitability in meeting your objectives and look for alternatives, where necessary. We will conduct this research on an independent basis without bias toward any one single solution or provider.
Report
This stage involves bringing together the information gathered in to an easy to understand report for you to keep. This report will demonstrate where you are in relation to reaching your objectives and whether your existing plans are on target to meet these.
Recommend
Having established your goals and researched your existing plans it may be that we have some suggestions for how you can move forward. Our financial plan will make firm recommendations as to how we believe you should proceed toward reaching your objectives.
Implement
This is the point in the process where we put the plan in to action. This involves liaising with product providers, preparation and submission of paperwork and progressing applications through to fruition. We aim to keep you fully informed as to the progress of your applications.
Review
We will keep in touch; we consider this to be a vital part of the financial planning process. This ensures that any strategy you have implemented is reviewed on a regular basis. Goal posts move, circumstances change and ‘life happens’. When these events happen, it is essential to re-visit each stage to make sure that you are still on track to meet your objectives. In most cases this involves minor ‘tweaks’ to a plan – rather than wholesale changes and we are more than happy to assist you with this process
Your financial planning process is a cycle
It is important that we work through each step with you – in turn – to create the right action plan and put the best solutions in place to meet your goals.
It is important to remember that financial advice is not, and has never been free. At Benedict Charles we work on a fixed fee basis for the initial advice. This means you will know exactly how much any work undertaken will cost.
““Rob has been invaluable in resolving the complex, financial planning issues we faced.
He is ever helpful and swift in providing the advice we need to make good decisions so we can feel confident our investments are well looked after.”
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