Keith (Berkshire)

Hi, I’m Keith Collyer and I’ve been working with UnaVida as a client for probably six or seven years, and our main adviser is Ray Best.

We’ve had a number of financial advisers over the years, we’ve never been particularly happy with any of them. They weren’t necessarily poor, they just weren’t right for us. So we’d been looking around and we hit on Ray, we thought this is someone we can work with.

We wanted to make the best of our pension pots, that was the main thing we were looking for. Because I had pots from a number of different companies over the years and my wife was much the same. We also had various investments, and we weren’t sure that we were making the best out of them. So we were looking for someone to help us.

My wife was using an accountant who recommended UnaVida and Ray, specifically, as someone we should talk to. When we initially asked him (the accountant) if he did have financial planning, he said, “No, I don’t, but I’ve got this contact who does”, and that was Ray.  We didn’t move everything across to his care at first, we did it gradually. But it became very obvious that this is someone who cares about his clients. There’s a very good personal relationship between us and we just felt his philosophy towards finance was aligned with ours. We’ve got a reasonable pension pot between us, there is enough to keep us in house and home for the foreseeable future and we’re very, very comfortable with the way that Ray is handling those parts and the advice he’s giving us on what we do with them, what we should draw out, how much and when and where etc.

We’ve arranged our wills through Ray’s advice and help. We’ve arranged lasting powers of attorney through Ray’s advice and help. We set up a trust for our children’s inheritance through Ray’s advice and help as well. It’s not just managing our investments, it’s managing the whole financial background.

We rely on his advice. We rely on what he does with moving money around and because we get on with him, we quite like working with him, we’re very happy to go and talk with him anytime. The best thing is, he does the best job for us that we can think of, in a way that we like.  He’s trustworthy, the advice he’s given us has turned out to be perfectly good advice. and when he talks about what the markets are doing, it’s panned out. Related to that he’s astute, he’s looking at the market, he understands what’s going on in the markets and again, that means we can rely on his advice which is always a good thing for a financial adviser and finally he’s a nice guy, he’s personal.

He’s done a good job for us, basically, we trust him. His advice has always proved to be sound. and that’s really all you can ask for in a financial adviser. The fact that he’s a nice guy and we like him and we get on with him, makes it a lot easier to work with him as well. So yes, absolutely would recommend him to anybody.