Most advice firms don’t have their charges on their website. It’s normally for one of three reasons:
- They don’t want to scare away potential new clients
- Their price changes depending on your circumstances; or the price is complicated; or the price is best explained in person
- They don’t want to reveal their prices to their competitors
We’ve struggled with all three of those things in the past, so we get it.
But we also think it’s important you know everything about us. After all, how can we ask you to trust us with your Financial Plan if we’re not open about our charges?
So here they are.
We have three stages to our process.
- Review, Research and Recommendation
- Implementation
- Ongoing support
Stage 1: The Three R’s
When you first come to us, we charge a fixed fee for Reviewing your existing policies, Researching how to improve the picture, and making a
Recommendation to move forward with.
The fee for this stage is based on complexity. The more complex, the higher the fee.
We charge £1,000 to review a Defined Contribution pension. A review of your workplace pension will cost £500. Reviewing your position relating to Carry Forward (a mechanism to fund your pension using more than one year’s allowance) would be £650.
(So for example, if you have an old workplace pension scheme and you want us to tell you whether you should fold it into your new workplace pension, your fee for The Three R’s would be £1,500 – which is £1,000 for the review of your old scheme, and £500 for the review of your current scheme.)
A charge for reviewing your ISA portfolio would be £1,000. A General Investment Account, also £1,000. Sophisticated investments (EIS/VCT/BPR) would be £2,500.
Preparing a strategy for Income Drawdown and Asset Decumulation would be £3,500.
If you have loads to review, you’ll pay more. If things are simple, you’ll pay less.
This is the key point:
Charging like this means we are genuinely impartial. We don’t need to recommend a switch of product just to generate a fee like some advisers do. It also means you can take our advice and execute it on your own – if you prefer self-managing for whatever reason.
We have an article which explains all about The Three R’s, what we do & how we do it, which can be found here.
Stage 2: Implementation
If you’d like us to implement the advice we give you, we charge a fee of 1% of anything you invest through us. Nice and simple.
Stage 3: Ongoing Support
If it’s suitable for you, we’ll invite you to use our Wealth Service. The annual charge for this service is 1% of the assets we manage on your behalf.
An explainer of the Wealth Service, including its features, benefits, and why it’s such a valuable service, can be found here.
So there they are, our fees in writing on our website. We always prefer to speak to you about how they work and why we think they represent value for money, and we are firm believers in the fairness of our charging structure.
If you have any questions about anything you’ve read, please don’t hesitate to ask!