Savings and Investment In Depth

We’ve listed a number of savings and investment questions under our About You section. All our clients will have shared one or more of these challenges before they approached us to help.

We look to take away these concerns for you. We simplify the investment process and administration. We consider the tax advantages and disadvantages of potential investments, specifically for you. We evaluate whether or not the risks are worth taking. We look to reduce your costs. We are both regulated and accountable for the advice and recommendations we make to you.

But before we can help you with investment advice, we need to evaluate your current financial position, your views regarding investment risk and ultimately to understand what you want these investments to actually do for you.

You may have clearly defined needs, goals, and timescales for your savings, or you may just be looking for the best possible returns on your money. Either way, understanding more about your financial situation helps us to ensure that your investment advice is appropriate and potentially rewarding for you.

Generally, new clients who come to us (and they are usually referred by existing clients or other professional advisers) fall into one of two main groups:

Experienced Investors

This group already tend to have existing investments but have usually been disappointed in some way, maybe by the investment performance, inappropriate risks that have been recommended to them, especially in hindsight, the service they have received or the costs and fees they've had to pay. Or maybe their trusted adviser has died or retired, and they are now looking for ongoing support and advice from someone new.

or

New Investors

This second group are generally new to the world of investment. They may have come into money through an inheritance, the sale of a business or home, a windfall like a lottery win or a legal settlement such as from a divorce or personal injury claim. Or maybe they have just built up a fund over a number of years through saving and they now consider this fund needs professional management. It may also be that they know they need to look at putting some money aside, but don’t know where to start.

When considering investment, it is always important to remember that, unlike deposits with banks and building societies, the value of investments can, and indeed will, fall from time to time and one can lose money, particularly in the short term. This could mean getting back less than originally invested. Clearly this is an important consideration and a real difference to simple deposit-based saving and one which we spend a significant amount of time exploring to ensure understanding of what these risks are and if they are worth taking in the attempt to obtain superior results.

Investing for the first time or with a large sum of money can be both stressful and challenging.

If you've only ever used bank or building society accounts (deposits) you may be unfamiliar with or may never have experienced first-hand, savings that can also fall in value. This is the main difference of deposits and investments. Investments by their nature can and will fall in value from time to time, but they do so in the expectation that over longer periods the relative performance should be better than deposits. If this were not the case, nobody would ever bother to invest and people would only hold cash.

Understanding what capital losses you can cope with (how much of a loss and for how long) and your expectations or needs for higher returns is key to the investment advice we give. You, like all investors, are looking for superior results. But these can only be achieved by exposing you to some degree of capital risk. We therefore spend a significant amount of time getting to understand your tolerance and capacity to investment risk and capital loss.

Once this is known and we know more about your financial position, we can put together a proposal for an investment portfolio that we believe is right for you, taking into account a number of personal and relevant factors.

 Past performance is not a guide to future performance.Changes in the exchange rate will affect the sterling value of your investment. The value of investments (including property) and the income derived from them may go down as well as up.