Our Advice Process - Protect and Invest

1. Assess your Appetite for Investment Risk

To begin with, we need to assess how much risk you are willing and able to accept with your money. This may be different for individual aspects of your portfolio, for example you may wish to have a higher level of risk on your long term pension fund, whilst prefering to be more cautious with your ISAs. As we treat each of your investments individually, we can easily cater for this. We will ask you to complete a short risk questionnaire, which puts a stick in the ground in terms of where you are on the risk scale. We will then discuss this with you in detail, to ensure you understand the results, and agree on the level of risk you find acceptable. Once agreed, we will confirm this to you in writing.

2. Agree your Investment Objectives

In order to meet your expectations and help you achieve your goal, it is important for us to understand why you are investing. Do you want to save for your Children's education? Do you want to retire early? Are you trying to achieve a certain standard of living in retirement? Do you need a minimum level of income now? Or it could be as simple as wanting to find the best home to grow your savings over the longer term. Being fully aware of your goals and aspirations allows us to position your portfolio in the most appropriate manner for your needs.

3. Select a Suitable Tax Wrapper

By selecting the tax wrapper we mean to say, what is the most appropriate mix of tax treatment, accessibility and complexity for the investment in question. All tax wrappers have their uses, so it is important to consider when to use each one and in what proportions. Examples of the most widely used tax wrappers are Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs), Pensions, Onshore and Offshore Investment Bonds and Unit Trusts/OEICs. For the more sophisticated investors, Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS) and Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) can be beneficial in certain circumstances. We will of course be able to explain to you how each of these types of tax wrapper work, and recommend whether they deserve a place in your portfolio.

4. Select the Investment Funds

Once we have established how much risk you want to take, why you are investing and decided upon the most appropriate investment vehicle, we will recommend a suitable portfolio of funds to you. This may be  one of our own portfolios, a fund that offers some form of investor protection or guarantees against market volatility or an individual collection of funds based upon the selection available in your existing investment product. No matter what the end result, you can be assured that we are using a structured and robust process in putting together the investment portfolio that best meets your needs.

5. Review and Rebalance

You wouldn't buy a brand new car and drive it for years without servicing it. If you did, its performance would quickly deteriorate. The same goes for investments. We will agree with you at outset how often we will review your investments, and we will put in place a review programme to ensure your portfolio remains optimized for your requirements. We will provide regular reporting so you know how your investments are performing, and we will give you  online access via our secure client portal so you can check on it as often as you wish.