Financial planning

We offer a wide range of financial and investment advice services, delivered holistically and ethically. Holistically, means that we take everything into account, often in conjunction with the advice being given by other professional advisers such as your accountant, solicitor or barrister. Ethically, means that we also take your personally held beliefs and values into account when advising you on how best to achieve your financial goals.

We provide a completely independent review of your financial situation. This includes a review of your vulnerability to insurable financial difficulties in the event of death, serious illness, disability, unemployment, or the need for long term care in old age.

We analyse your income, expenditure, and cash flow planning to help model your financial future. This helps you better understand and prioritise your objectives and requirements, and is the best way to let us know how to achieve them.

We specialise in providing advice that will help you to align your investments with your ethical and personal values. We do this on a bespoke basis that can enable you to include themes that are important to you, such as fair trade and carbon emissions reduction. We can also advise on how best to exclude certain activities such as weapons manufacturing and distribution or animal testing, for example.

We also operate an award winning model portfolio service that we call The Key to the Future. This is a sustainable and impactful investment portfolio that meets the needs of most clients who are looking to do no harm to people or the planet, whilst as the same time aiming to achieve their income and growth investment objectives.

We carry out detailed research on the underlying companies held by funds used in the Key to the Future. We use this research to carry out engagement with fund managers and in some instances we will call for a company to be sold because of its poor sustainability and or negative impacts on people and the planet.

We help you set and achieve realistic financial objectives. These may include retiring at a certain age or providing an income for retirement now. You may be worried that your pension pot isn’t sufficient to last your lifetime, or to provide for your loved ones. We can help you to assess the situation and, where needed, take action to make things work out the way you want.

Most importantly, we help you to review your financial planning objectives, and progress, on a regular basis. We offer different review packages to accommodate all requirements. Click here to see our client agreement, which provides full details of our financial planning process and review packages, including likely fees for these services.

Remember, we operate on a nil commission basis. In most cases, this greatly reduces the cost of financial advice to you and means that any advice you receive is not contingent on you buying a financial services product that you might not need.

We act for you and not the life insurance company or financial institution. We always remember who’s paying us!

Our independent financial planning service encompasses:

What legal protection do I have?

We will always endeavour to ensure the products recommended are suitable for you.

When we are advising you on regulated products (including investments and life insurance and pensions) you have the protection of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).

If you are unhappy about the advice or service you have received, you should firstly contact the firm that provided the advice or service.

This gives them the chance to put things right and/or to provide their own version of events. Should you remain dissatisfied you maybe entitled to refer your complaint to the FOS who will investigate the complaint independently and make a ruling.

The FOS work with customers and financial advisers to resolve a complaint, and when they do have to make a ruling it is binding upon the firm. Full details of how to contact the FOS together with information about how to complain are available from their website – www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk or by telephoning 0800 023 4 567.

If you try to submit a complaint to a firm and the firm is dissolved, or unable to meet its obligations, you may have recourse to the FSCS (Financial Services Compensation Scheme).

This service is funded by levies on firms that are authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority to protect customers where firms have closed or gone into liquidation.

Anything else I should know?

Some financial advisers give advice on products that are not regulated by FCA – such as general taxation and some Buy-to-Let mortgages.

Your adviser will explain to you when you are receiving advice on an unregulated product. It is important you are happy with the advice as you may not have the added protection of the FOS or FSCS when dealing with some unregulated products.