Financial Planning is an ongoing journey, focusing on you and your objectives in life
It’s about changing the focus, from products, pensions, ISAs and so forth, and putting the emphasis on you and what you want to achieve in life.
Once we know your life objectives, and these will be as unique as you are, we can build a financial plan to achieve them. Of course, the plan will need to be reviewed to keep it on track.
Here at Handford Aitkenhead & Walker, we follow a multi-stage process:
We will meet to discuss your current situation and start to understand your objectives and values. This will also give you an opportunity to see how we work and decide if you would like to work with us. We’ll also provide details on likely fees and next steps.
1Once we’ve agreed to work together we’ll meet again and start talking specifics. We’ll gather as much information as possible about your financial life and talk in detail about your objectives, both of which will help us to develop your financial plan.
2We will gather data on any existing financial products and arrangements you hold. Some providers are quicker to respond than others and so this typically takes anywhere from 2-6 weeks.
3We will spend the next few weeks analysing the data and building a complete financial planning model of your lifetime, which we will use to consider how best to exploit opportunities and to mitigate threats.
4We will meet again and work through a visualisation of your lifetime financial planning model, considering various ‘what if’ scenarios. This will allow you to see your financial life with complete clarity and the ‘what if’ scenarios will help you understand the effects of our recommendations. At the end of this session, we will agree the best ways forward.
5We will send you your financial plan. This will include the risks faced and the costs involved and should allow you to make an informed decision. We offer a further meeting if needed to discuss any questions and assist with any paperwork.
6A further meeting to walk through the financial plan, answer questions and consider any further thoughts reading the plan may have raised.
7At this point our administration team will work with your planner to deal with documentation and put in place any recommended products, keeping in touch to update you on the process. We then provide you with regular updates, newsletters and valuations. Our website is updated each month too, with the latest personal finance news.
8Even the most carefully prepared plan can be blown off course. Regular review meetings are a vital part of achieving your objectives. We’ll update your objectives and review the progress we are making together, to achieve them. We will also discuss how any investments we manage on your behalf have performed. All meetings are followed with a formal report providing updates and advice as needed.
9If you need to talk to us about any aspect of your financial planning, we are always available either on e-mail, phone or in person. This is included in our standard ongoing service at no extra cost and we encourage all clients to take advantage of this.
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