You’re thinking about partnering with Spiritus Wealth, which is great news. Here’s a handy guide to help you with what’s going to happen over the coming weeks
Step 1: Discovery
Discovery is an opportunity for you to understand our business, see how we can add value to you and your family over time, and most importantly work out if you’re comfortable with your prospective advice team.
From our side, we need to do two things: gain a clear idea of your circumstances (both financial and personal) and identify how we might be able to help you.
The first stage is usually a 15-minute telephone meeting where we have a chat about what it is you need help with, your general financial circumstances, and your experience of financial planning.
The next step is to organise your Discovery Meeting. These usually take place in our offices, but if you prefer we can also meet at your home, or via remote meeting.
Prior to the appointment we will send digital copies of our Data Protection Notice, our Terms of Business documentation, as well as any other relevant brochures so you have plenty of time to review their contents. We try to be paperless wherever possible.
The meeting is relaxed and informal, and absolutely confidential. It usually lasts for about an hour. The aim is to find out more about you and your family, your aspirations and your financial hopes, and to discuss how your money fits in with these objectives. Only then can we start to understand you and what you’re looking to achieve from your engagement with Spiritus.
We’ll talk to you about some of the relevant services we offer, introduce you to the planning technology we use, and give you a guided tour of our online portal and app, WealthView. We’ll also have a pretty detailed discussion around risk, capacity for loss, asset allocation and portfolio construction. This helps us to understand how you’ve run your financial life to date.
Quite a lot to fit into an hour!
We’re committed to working with families to whom we can add significant value and we’re realistic that not everybody will benefit from the services we offer. Equally, if for any reason you feel we’re not the perfect advice partner for you, we can part as friends at this point with no hard feelings.
The next step is where things get ultra-specific.
Step 2: Audit
Now we understand what you’d like to achieve and you understand more about how we work, the next step is to work out how your financial life is currently structured.
The objective is to capture a full understanding of your financial picture.
We’ll data-mine the details of your existing policies, including details of your investment portfolios and asset allocations, as well as charging summaries across your policies. We will liaise with your providers on your behalf to manage this through to its conclusion.
If you have any Defined Benefit arrangements we will also request details of these from the Trustees – including how the income re-values before and after retirement, how the death benefits work, as well as its funding status and security.
We’ll show you how to request your State Pension projection using the Government Gateway.
You’ll need to provide us with your Driving Licence or Passport, and one recent utility bill so we can verify your identity.
As the data comes in we’ll begin to create your bespoke Cash Flow Model, and then build your current investment portfolio using our Analytics software in order to understand its risk profile, asset allocation and volatility metrics.
How quickly this happens is dependent on the efficiency of your existing providers and the complexity of your circumstances. A good rule of thumb is to give them 6 weeks, though we hope to have everything sooner than that.
We’ll keep you updated throughout the journey so you know how things are unfolding. We do this remotely, there’s no need to come in to see how we’re getting on.
Once we have the required information, we’ll be in touch so we can move onto the next step: Advice.
Step 3: Advice
Once we have received, logged and analysed your financial data, this is the point at which we begin to make recommendations and provide advice. We do this in three parts.
Design Meeting
The first part is your Design Meeting. This is a pretty active meeting with plenty of input from both sides as we kick around some ideas and model different approaches.
We tend to hold these meetings virtually via join.me and screen share, or we can meet again in person should you prefer.
It’s a chance to have a good chat about the various options open to you, including an assessment of the features and benefits of your existing plans.
We might recommend making wholesale changes to your planning approach, and we might leave certain things as they are. But our objective is to give you an honest appraisal of where you stand financially; and then formulate the right advice in order to move your planning forward.
Expect an in-depth audit of your retirement planning, your investments, tax planning, inheritance planning, your estate plans, and a liability audit.
We’ll talk about all relevant parts of your financial life. This can be anything from how to most efficiently help the kids to buy their first homes, working out what can be spent on that trip of a lifetime, to building a robust retirement strategy and preparing for market corrections.
You’ll sign up to whichever of our service levels is appropriate for you, we’ll confirm the fee structures of your new setup and show you how that compares to your previous plans.
Report
The next stage is for us to formalise our advice in the form of a Financial Planning Report, which we send to you digitally. This will be with you within 10 days of the Design Meeting.
This in-depth document details our discussions and recommendations, and once you are happy with the contents of the report we will organise your Onboarding Meeting to execute the advice.
Onboarding Meeting
This meeting will likely be a couple of weeks after your Design Meeting and will last approximately an hour.
The first part is spent discussing the Financial Planning Report and going over the key points of the advice once more – this is a chance to clarify anything which might be unclear.
The next step is to ask you to sign the necessary paperwork and provider discharge forms (one of the only paper-based functions left in our process).
We’ll set you up with online access to your new Investment Platform, create your WealthView portal, help you download and link the app, set up our monthly communication package, and map out the next 12 months so you know what to expect going forward.
At this point the Onboarding stage is complete. You’ll have a thorough understanding of all parts of your planning.
Welcome to Spiritus Wealth.