Strategic planning service

Our strategic life and financial planning service is the start point for the ongoing, long-term planning process. This is an essential intellectual exercise that sets you on the road to achieving your profound life and financial goals in the most efficient and quickest way. We enable you to resolve the never-ending tension between what you want and need today, with what you will want and need tomorrow. Your plan assesses risk and helps to reduce the risk of failure from both internal and external events. It will provide you with the freedom to live a fulfilled life free of painful issues around money and indeed has the potential to change your life in the most dramatic and far-reaching way.

What is planning?

Strategic life financial planning is about managing money to achieve your most important and profound life goals, putting life before money and not having money lead the way you live.

It is therefore necessary to address the “human side of money” as well as the figures and financial products of conventional financial planning. To be at ease with money we must come to terms with the often emotive aspects of money, the pain around money and our past money experiences that influence the way we handle money today.

Your strategic financial plan will also encompass goal setting, budgeting, cash flow, compound returns, risk assessment, options, scenario evaluations, protection, pensions, investment and tax to form an integrated and holistic plan.

How do we prepare your plan?

Unsurprisingly, financial planning is a process. We start with a free initial Exploration meeting in which we explore your current financial life, concerns and issues. If you then decide to appoint us as your life and financial planner we will move to the Vision stage, in which we facilitate a process of discovering where you want to be, how you want to lead your life, what values you deem essential to your life. At the same time we ask you to provide us with comprehensive details of your personal and financial circumstances so we can build financial statements and a foundation life time cash flow (see diagram).

In the Obstacles phase the plan itself begins to emerge as the “ifs” and “buts” are addressed and strategies for both life and money are formulated. These are often “in the mind” as well as “in the money”. The lifetime cash flow forms the basis for assessing options and what-if scenarios. Hence we can assess the impact of, say, retiring now against retiring in five years time or moving to a three day week. We will integrate your own risk profile into your plan and help you to understand how your attitude to risk affects your ability to achieve goals; we will also look at the impact of stock market performance on your plans.

This is the Knowledge phase, during which we help you understand fundamental financial concepts. With a clear strategic direction we are able to flesh out the detail of your plan by introducing clear recommendations for the structure of your finances so they efficiently work towards the achievement of your life goals. A key part of this is the development of an investment policy to ensure investments support life goals and to guide investment decisions in an uncertain environment.

In the final Execution phase we will, on your instruction, implement the financial elements for you. This will almost certainly include developing briefs for your other advisers, such as your solicitor, accountant or wealth manager.

The outcome

For those who embrace the process wholeheartedly (and it can be challenging), the results are often, literally life changing. You will have a clear set of profound life goals and a strategy for achieving them. Importantly, you will have a firm grasp of where you are now and where you expect to be in the future. You will have clear spending plans, enabling you to spend money without fear or guilt on goods, services and investments that will help you achieve your goals, whilst avoiding purchases not essential to your profound life goals without feelings of pain.

In short, you will be financially well organised, and on a path to achieving your goalsin the knowledge that you will  not run out of money.

And after the plan?

Your plan is just a start point; to achieve you goals will require constant reviews and monitoring of your goals and your money. As part of your plan we will suggest that you enroll on one of our ongoing programmes, which include regular contact and reviews, management and monitoring of investments and access to our fundamental financial planning skills. There is no obligation on you to adopt these services, but experience tells us that those who do are much more likely to achieve their goals, and achieve them in a faster time.

Our fees

We charge a fee for this service based on the time we spend on developing your plan. The initial Exploration meeting is free and at the end of this we will be able to give you a clear idea of the likely costs. These can be as low as £750 for clients whose circumstances are straightforward, and can rise to up to £5,000 for more complex cases.

All fees include VAT.

Client agreement

Clients are asked to sign the Strategic Planning Service Client Agreement, which you should read carefully.

Next steps

Please contact us to arrange an Exploration meeting in our offices; this is free, without commitment and in strict confidence.