FAQs

Meetings are held by appointment at our offices at 4 Beech Court, Wokingham Road, Hurst, Berkshire, RG10 0RQ. We may request, in the initial stages, that we meet at your place of work if you are a business owner, as this helps us gain a good understanding of your enterprise.

Our offices are easily accessible and have private parking with spaces for visitors.

We do not ask for upfront payments for initial exploratory meetings.

Please allow 40-45 minutes for the initial exploratory meeting. It is helpful to bring documents that identify you, such as a passport and driving licence. If you require advice, then it is helpful (but not essential) to bring copies of:

• Your will
• Pension statements
• Mortgage statements
• Investment portfolios

Yes! We are absolutely committed to providing comprehensive, INDEPENDENT financial planning advice.

All legitimate UK independent financial advisers are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It is advisable to carry out a check on the FCA website.
We are directly regulated by the FCA, our reference number is 440577.

That entirely depends on the service you require. Are you looking for one-off advice or both initial and ongoing advice, for example?

We will discuss fees with you at your initial meeting when we have had the chance to discover what kind of service you are looking for and explore where we could add value in your specific circumstance.

Whatever fee agreement we enter into, we only engage with clients when we believe that we can add significant value over and above any fees paid.

We find that most clients could be managing their tax affairs more efficiently. We work closely with accountants and tax planners and present their suggestions on how you could be more tax-efficient (if applicable) in our report for you (if requested).

If your current investments have been arranged using standard financial service industry templates, then the chances are that your portfolio is underperforming.

The financial services industry use templates based on research carried out 70 years ago and has a rigid, fixed percentage geographic split. They are often arranged on a 60% equity / 40% asset allocation, which means they could have suffered from both equities and bonds dropping over the past two years.

We adopt a more flexible approach. Our investment models are bespoke and selected using up-to-date investment research.

We get a lot of professional introductions, plus we are receiving an increasing number of clients who have been disappointed with the service they have received from the large advisory companies.

Yes. We specialise in advising business owners.

Many business owners start a small business. Over the course of many years, they find themselves running a much larger business. They remain loyal to their existing advisers, even though the complexity of advising a larger business has outgrown them.

We find that business owners believe their financial arrangements are adequate, but we always find gaps, both in protecting their business and family and in opportunities missed.

Pension portfolios on retirement need to be aligned with the arrangements you held prior to retirement. In many cases, we find that there is no perceptible change. But without sight of your retirement planning, we cannot comment. We do provide a second opinion service, though!

This service is not provided by UnaVida.

We do have an associated company that does provide this service, though, which we can signpost you to.

We believe that if you are providing investment advice, advice should be guided by investment market research, this is especially true in today’s volatile investment markets.

Developing an understanding of the forces driving markets, whether they are economic, monetary or political, we believe is essential.

We access a number of the world’s most highly regarded research services covering global strategy and investment trends. From this we derive an understanding of the major markets, affecting shares, bonds, currencies and commodities – from both a technical, behavioural and fundamental economic perspective.

Often the research provides an opportunity to identify investment trends before they are more widely appreciated.

We provide an investment advisory service.

That means that all investment advice requires the investor’s approval before any changes can be made. This allows clients to retain an element of control and develop an understanding of what investment markets are doing at any one time.

This type of service is also helpful for clients with large capital gains within a portfolio, as otherwise if they had opted for a discretionary investment approach may mean you lose control of managing a tax liability.

Another reason for choosing an advisory approach rather than discretionary could be due to legal constraints, such as a Lasting Power of Attorney which doesn’t include the necessary permissions to delegate investment management to a discretionary fund manager.

No we do not provide this service.

A key drawback of discretionary management is that there is a cost for this discretionary service, a charge which can vary widely from one discretionary manager to another.

We provide a range of model portfolios .

It is important to state that these are not standard financial service industry model portfolios. We discarded following industry templated models some three years ago, as we found that their fixed geographic asset allocation approach was unable to cope with more volatile market conditions.

A model portfolio is a collection or mix of a variety of investments employing a diversified investment approach to target a particular balance of return and risk or portfolio objective.

We design our own model portfolios based upon our investment market research.
Model portfolios are a diversified group of investments designed to achieve an expected return with the corresponding risk. Ideally, each portfolio has a combination of managed investments based on extensive research. These portfolios blend asset classes, investment managers and investment strategies to achieve diversification.

There are several advantages to investing in a model portfolio. Here are a few benefits you should consider when determining if this is the right investment choice for your financial goals and objectives.

1. Diversification
A model portfolio allows you to diversify your assets. Diversification is an investment strategy that helps investors reduce risk by distributing funds across multiple financial vehicles, asset categories and industries. To maximize returns while reducing risk exposure, we select investments that may react in different ways when the same event occurs.

2. Research and Professional Analysis
Another advantage of investing in a model portfolio is the professional analysis and extensive research to create detailed investment strategies and philosophies before selecting the assets for each portfolio. This means that they have put in place a clear review process for assessing each investment in the portfolio and will evaluate its individual performance on an ongoing basis.

We use a sophisticated state of the art investment programme FE Analytics.
This allows us to demonstrate to clients our entire investment proposition, ensuring investment suitability and increased efficiency.

We are able to browse and compare over 300,000 portfolios and instruments including Onshore and Offshore UT & OEICS, Investment Trusts and DFMs to shortlist funds based on your suitability criteria.

This provides very detailed analysis of your current investment portfolio, and enables you to compare this with any recommendation we make.

We can access key European ESG Template (EET data) and ESG ratings from ISS within the fund filter, factsheets, portfolio scans and reporting features to research and recommend investments which match your investment objectives and values.

We can also provide original fund documentation, including fund factsheets, key facts, annual reports, prospectuses and KIIDs. Analyse performance, ratios, holding information and risks using a huge range of sophisticated charting and analysis tools.

For an initial look at your pension arrangements, we prefer to proceed on a no obligation, no cost to you, basis.

There is little point in discussing charges at too early a stage, as we do not know if you have a problem with your pension arrangements or not or not, nor do we know if we can add value.

Hopefully when we have carried out an initial assessment, you will realise whether you have any shortcomings with your pensions or not.
Then you are free to discuss your pension arrangements further with ourselves, or any other adviser.

What we bring to the table, is clarity.

Pensions are overly complex, often clients present us with 50-page reports from their pension provider but are still unclear as to what their benefits are, and often aren’t even aware of the funds they are invested in.

This can be further complicated by the pension provider. IBM for example uses white label funds, making it difficult for a lay person to judge the performance of their pension funds.

We use a one-page summary, providing all the information you require to make an informed decision.

Yes.

Despite the unnecessary complexity, we believe that contributing to a pension provides fantastic planning opportunities if they receive and act upon good advice.

Most people contributing to pensions receive contributions as a percentage of their base salary from their employer (say 8%), they may add 8% themselves. That means they are making combined contributions of 16% over a 40-year period, if they stay in the same employment.

Yet they expect retire on 66% of their final salary and trust that will last them for their 40 years of retirement.

The sums do not add up.

The answer to your question, is that it depends! We need to consider your full financial circumstances, before answering your question.

It depends what type of pension you are referring to, advantageous rules now apply to money purchase schemes, allowing one to nominate whoever they choose to benefit from their pension.

If the nominee has children and grandchildren, then it is possible to provide a cascade of wealth through the generations – all free of inheritance tax.

Entrepreneurial Directors can create collective pension schemes with up to 12 members, economies of scale can reduce the costs of administration and the Directors can also act as trustees and choose their own flexible investment strategies.

Frequently we are confronted with clients who may hold as many as 12/15 different pension arrangements. It is very difficult to devise a sensible investment strategy for so many arrangements.

Many of these schemes do not have the flexible options that more modern pension arrangements have.

A detailed check needs to be carried out on all the exiting pensions to make sure that switching them into a more modern flexible pension does not lose any benefit or suffer a loss.

Typically, your existing advisers will provide advice on their area of expertise, but often fail to understand the big picture. That often means that opportunities are missed. A fresh look at the financial arrangements of the business is often beneficial.

I spent two years working in a business efficiency unit and was rapidly promoted to head of method studies. The reason for the rapid advancement – I had an ability to resolve problems with a variety of businesses, that other experienced strategic advisers had missed.

We start with an overview of the financial arrangements of both the business and the directors, as often the financials of both are intertwined. This often highlights potential problems and opportunities.

Our initial review is carried out at no cost to you, all we ask is for you to send us the information we require to fully understand your financial circumstances, so that we can assess the value we can provide to you and your business.

It will also allow us to assess whether you require ongoing assistance, or simply require a one-off project.

So, the answer to your question is that our initial evaluation is at our cost, after that it depends on the amount of work that is required to assist and support you and your business, you can compare that to the value we add.

This would not be a normal recommendation of ours, as it and can lead to a loss of control of the business.

That depends very much on the results of our initial research into the business, and if our recommendations are accepted, follow up action by the Directors.

That is an interesting question, we normally find that the Directors of the business are perfectly capable of growing the business, with regular guidance.

The service we provide is to highlight issues within the business that are holding it back, in addition we often improve the cash flow of the business.

We introduce strategies and tools that will allow the Directors of the business to have more control of:

• the amount of personal and business tax they pay;
• growing both the business and personal wealth of the directors.

No, we offer an additional service, we prefer that your existing advisers stay in place.