Why seek financial advice now?

The myth.

To quickly do away with a common myth, financial advice isn’t limited to people who have accumulated vast amounts of assets, investments and savings. It’s not even limited to people with at least a modest degree wealth. In its purest form, financial planning should be preventative and proactive - not reactionary – making it relevant to everyone.

Unfortunately these preconceptions are widely held, yet they totally miss the point of financial planning. After all, its counterintuitive to start financial planning once you’ve already amassed your wealth. By this stage, you will almost definitely have missed out on a broad range of opportunities to better protect and grow your lifetime earnings.

The solution.

Ultimately, not much can be done about the actions you’ve taken to date, so the focus is on the future. It just depends on whether that “future” starts now, or in 5, 10 or 20 years’ time. Needless to say, the earlier the better, as the impact can increase exponentially.

For this reason, we sincerely believe that a quick financial check-up should be as common as a trip to the dental hygienist (although a little less intimidating, at least for those of you who don’t relish a trip to the dentist). You don’t necessarily visit a hygienist to fix a problem; you attend to avoid having to fix future – potentially irreversible – problems.

To that end, we go to the gym to avoid serious health issues in the first place, not because those health issues have already arisen and need to be managed. Similarly, seeking legal advice before entering into a contract is generally far cheaper and immeasurably less time consuming than only consulting a lawyer once you’ve been sued.

The future.

As our personal and professional lives evolve, it’s totally natural – even essential - that our priorities and goals shift, so it’s well worth checking in at different touchpoints throughout our lives to reflect on our financial decisions and plan effectively for the next stages. We should do so annually at the very least, as well as at the key junctures or milestones that define the stages we’ve reached. This will provide the springboard for what we do next.

This approach can save us vast amounts of money in the longer-term – far more than any financial adviser’s fees – as well as helping us to understand the consequences of the paths we subsequently decide to take. For example, many of our new clients come to us in a position where they are woefully underinsured, are missing out on thousands of pounds’ worth of potential tax savings and reliefs, and could be generating vastly greater returns on their retirement funds. In the vast majority of cases, this can all be rectified with only a few simple adjustments, and at a proportionately negligible cost.

So this now begs a new (hopefully now rhetorical) question:
why would you not see a financial adviser?