Perhaps you’ve never considered working with a financial adviser before. Or perhaps you’ve had financial advice from your bank, through work or remotely by email. Experiences and expectations vary enormously from the clinical and brief, to the pushy hard sell and the darn right tedious.
At Progeny, we like to think that the experience we offer our clients is something different and definitely better than the norm. What’s more it’s not necessarily the sort of experience you’d expect when it comes to seeing a financial adviser.
Defining your goals and aspirations
One of the first meetings you have with us will be all about defining your goals and aspirations. This process is a far cry from trawling through financial documents and discussing the ins and outs of the latest financial products. In fact, this meeting is all about you. Clients have described it as cathartic, exciting, inspiring and fun! We’ll start by asking you some questions to help you identify your goals and any burning issues. We’ll listen to your hopes and dreams and we’ll throw some ideas around to try and work out what matters to you, and what you still want to achieve and do.
We’ll listen to your hopes and dreams and we’ll throw some ideas around to try and work out what matters to you, and what you still want to achieve and do.
The sort of things we discuss will be gifts to children, future milestones like that “big holiday” or extension, or even looking at funding future care costs. Retirement doesn’t look like it did 30 years ago as more and more retirees are setting up their own businesses, becoming involved in philanthropy and charitable causes, or travelling the world. But if that sounds like you, you still probably want to be sure, that as you move towards your later years, you’re going to be comfortable and well cared for.
Developing your plan
Once you know (and we know) what you want from your retirement, we can start to work out what you need to do in order to ensure that it happens. This is often a refreshing and positive part of the process – it is from here we can start to help you develop your plan and decide how you want the rest of your life to look. We match your current and future incomes and assets against your current and future lifestyle costs. We can do this for a number of different future scenarios to help answer those “But what if…?” questions. We have easy to understand, completely personalised and very visual cash flow software that does this, so you can see your future finances on the screen. That enables us to tell you what you need to be doing now to make sure you do not run out of money later.
This is the beginning of your road-map to financial independence and peace of mind. It helps you to bring your financial future into the here and now. If there is going to be a shortfall, we don’t just point it out and move on. We work out what you need to do to plug the gap and stay on track. However, more often than not, clients are pleasantly surprised that they can afford a particular expense and still be financially secure, even if the worst happens.
Your own personal risk manager
Once we have your plan in place, in essence we act as your risk managers to ensure that you achieve all your goals in a sensible and prudent way. This is an essential part of our process and is in addition to any investment funds we manage on your behalf which we have a separate process for. Over the coming years, we will continue to review your plan to ensure you remain on target. Or, if your circumstances or ambitions have changed, we’re here to restructure your plan as necessary.
Over the coming years, we will continue to review your plan to ensure you remain on target. If your circumstances or ambitions have changed, we’re here to restructure your plan as necessary.
Someone you know
The result of the above is, that we will get to know each other pretty well. Most of our meetings our at our office premises and that gives you a chance to meet the rest of the team. But we can come to you in some circumstances.
What that means is, that when you pick up the phone to talk to us for whatever reason that may be, you know who you’re talking to you and you know that we have a full and thorough understanding of your situation. In today’s world of apps, automation and artificial intelligence, we think that actually knowing the person you’re dealing with is both rare and important.
What we don’t do
Bamboozle you with jargon
We will try our utmost to explain things in any easy to understand way. We know only too well that financial products can be boring to our clients, so we will also try to limit your exposure to this.
Buy now! Sell now!
We have no idea if it’s the right time to invest or not in the investment markets. Whatever anyone else may say, they don’t know either! No one does. Nor do we know when the next stock market crash is going to happen. We do not listen to the noise of the market, or make rash investment decisions.
What we do know is that patience rewards investors over the longer term. And that it is ‘time in’ the market rather than ‘timing’ the market that matters in the long run. Again, we’ve got software that explains what we mean by this and we’ve talked about it in previous blogs.
Investing is not about playing and beating the markets. It’s about making sensible, long term investments in a way that has been shown to achieve sensible returns. Our investment portfolios are based upon the principles of evidence-based investing. That may mean that we’re not seen as exciting, but it does means that you’ll have predictable and reliable returns as well as peace of mind.
Inflate your expectations
We will never claim to know what the next best new shiny investment concept is. Our experience has shown, time and time again, that if something looks too good to be true and is offering 10% plus returns a year, it usually is too good to be true.
