Look for an adviser that leads with the financial planning
The old school of financial advice is where the adviser leads with the investments.
Yes there will be a meeting with tea and biscuits and a bit of chat about the children but really it’s all about finding out how much money is available to invest and getting to the ‘close’ as quickly as possible.
It all a bit unedifying and doesn’t serve the client very well at all. The investments might be fine but where is the context?
What are the investments for? What are they trying to achieve for you? When is the money required and for what?
A much better approach is to lead with the financial planning.
This means a detailed discussion (where you do most of the talking!) about your lives, how you got to where you are now and where you want to be in the future. What are your hopes and fears and the things you’ll regret not doing in the future?
As far as we’re aware we only get one stab at this life and we also only have a certain number of healthy and sprightly years. A good financial planner will start by helping to articulate what your ideal life looks like and then see if the money can be matched to that.
Have you got enough to do all of the things that you want to do? If you’re still working then what needs to happen to close that gap? Can we put a plan in place for that?
If you’re not working anymore and we’re working with whatever you have now, what are the priorities and the potential trade-offs to make sure that you do the things that are most important to you?
After these discussions, it’s a case of matching the way your money is managed to when you need it. In the extreme, if you needed all of the money tomorrow then you would leave it in the bank and, in the other extreme, if you needed it all in 30 years then you could do something completely different, Obviously most people need different amounts of money at different times and this is where the financial planning comes in.
But only once we know what the money is for, how much you need and when.
