Let’s be perfectly honest – not everyone is going to find value in what we do. It’s just the way it is. And we celebrate that – we can’t be ‘all things to all men’ if we’re doing our job right… it’s just not possible.
We think there are 5 clear signs you shouldn’t hire us to be your advisers.
In no particular order:
1. You can’t give us two hours of your time per year
Sounds ridiculous, I know. But we like to see you every year, and this is for loads of reasons…
- Legislation moves on. The rules could change and you might need to react to those changes.
- Markets constantly evolve. Your portfolio will need checking to ensure it remains suitable.
- Your personal circumstances change, and so will your goals and objectives. What was suitable when it was set up can quickly become unsuitable, especially in light of changing circumstances.
So we need to see you once a year. If you can’t commit to that, we shouldn’t work together.
2. Beating the market is your top priority
This one is quite self-explanatory. We’re firm believers in Passive investing. We believe markets are efficient, they’re impossible to time, and that ‘outperformance’ can’t be consistent.
We believe it’s all about the disciplines of risk, volatility, asset allocation and rebalancing. Not stock selection.
We believe this because we’ve looked at the evidence, and we keep looking at the evidence, and we won’t change our mind until the evidence shows us we should change our mind.
If all you want to do is beat the market, you’ll find our approach frustrating. But if you’re willing to be guided by the evidence, you’ll find investing with us is as close to stress-free as possible.
3. You want to self-manage your portfolio
Linked to the last point, feel free to manage your own portfolio on a consumer platform if you want to. Some people really enioy it and it gives them a lot of pleasure. They might even do fairly well!
But we’re Financial Advisers, and that means we have a responsibility to make sure your investments are suitable when you buy them, and remain suitable while you hold them.
We can’t fulfil that responsibility if you’re self-managing your portfolio. Why pay for advice if you don’t end up taking it?
4. You’re hiring us because you hope we can predict the future
We’re Financial Planners. We’ve studied the disciplines of our science for years and we’ve carefully crafted our knowledge… testing & evolving it regularly in the real world with real people and real scenarios. The result? We’re experts in our field.
But despite all that, we’re still not Mystic Meg, and nor will we ever be.
We can’t tell you what’s going to happen in the next Budget. We also don’t know what the market’s going to do tomorrow, next week, next year. We don’t know which fund or ETF or market sector is about to outperform its peers. Nobody does. And if they tell you they do, they’re probably lying to you.
We’re planners. We plan with the information we have, and when things change we react calmly and we rely on our experience and the disciplines of asset-building behaviour.
We’re not in the business of making baseless predictions. Or worse, pretending we know what comes next.
5. You only want advice on your Pension or ISA or Investment Account
We can only do our job if we have the whole picture.
We go on and on about getting away from product brokerage and into the broader discipline of planning, and this is exactly why. If we don’t know everything about your financial circumstances, our advice is next-to-worthless.
- What if we use your CGT allowance, but you’ve used it elsewhere and not told us, giving you an entirely avoidable tax bill?
- What if your Dividend Allowance has been used by the same portfolio, but you don’t tell us and we miscalculate your income?
- …Which means we miscalculate your pension allowance?
- …Which means you get a tax penalty on top of your avoidable tax bill?
It’s the same reason we can’t work with you if you have another adviser looking after another part of your portfolio. We need to know the full picture to do our job. If we don’t have the full picture, it’s a shame but we can’t be your adviser.
So that’s it – we hope this article is helpful and gives you an idea of how we work and why we might not be the best fit for you. We are firm believers that honesty is always the best policy, and we’d never want you to waste your time or your money.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
