Article

FREE Pensions Advice - The Truth Revealed, by an adviser
- May 2008

By Chris Clark - (The Thinc Group)

Address: 27 Springfield Lyons Approach, Chelmsford, CM2 0RB
Telephone: 07810 55 32 30
Fax: 01245 39 80 11
E-mail: chris.clark@thinc.com
Visit our Web Site: www.thinc.com

You may find it incredible to believe, but pension planning does not have to be an expensive, time consuming exercise that ultimately leads to disappointment. The general belief is that you either pay a large fee (or number of fee’s) to a financial adviser to plan your retirement or you find a ‘commission bias’ adviser who will deliver low quality advice and recommend solutions to suit their financial plans and not yours.

The truth is however that the control is entirely in your hands to ensure you receive high quality advice that enhances your financial well-being, and simply by following the 4 steps below you can ensure peace of mind in your financial plan, without writing out any cheques!

Step One – How to find the IFA who’s ‘probably’ the right one:

Start by asking friends and family if they have an adviser they have used for a number of years & who they trust. A referral from a friend or family member is of course the ideal way to find an IFA.

If however your friends and family do not have a good word to say about their adviser (typically & unfortunately because the adviser hasn’t stayed in touch or has let them down) then you’ll need to do a little work yourself. Fortunately this can be quite straightforward.

Websites such as searchifa.co.uk and others allow you to find IFA’s in your local area. This will give you a shortlist to work from (pick 3 of them at random) – but to know which one to use you’ll need to ask them a few teasing questions...their response will tell you everything you need to know.

Step Two - Test the adviser:

Now, the last thing you will want to do is waste your time with an unreliable or untrustworthy individual – and there are some out there. So...how do you find out who is worth your valuable time? The answer is to call them and probe them with the following questions - these will put you in control of the relationship from the outset and get the adviser on full alert:

1. Can you provide at least 3 written testimonials from your existing clients?



2. Do you work on a whole of market & independent basis?



3. Are you paid by fee or commission?



4. Do you efficiently asset allocate your clients plans?



5. Can you call me at 4pm to discuss further?

1. An adviser who can’t either won’t have kept their clients, won’t have a good enough relationship to ask, or has not thought about how important this is. Either one of these reasons is a reason not to pursue with the adviser.



2. Meaning they can recommend any provider – a question designed simply to cut out anyone who has restricted their advice to a few providers thus restricting the ability to give thorough advice.



3. If you find someone trustworthy then why worry if it’s fee’s or commission. Fee’s will have VAT added and are there to lower perceived commission bias, personally, I would suggest you use a commission based adviser so that you don’t pay if you don’t like what they have to say.



4. It will surprise them that you know this! Basically, modern pension planning principles say that there is such a thing as an ideal ‘fund mix’ (aka ‘asset allocation’) to suit your particular preferred risk level & term to retirement – to increase the ‘probability’ of projected pension income increasing. If an adviser doesn’t use this then they’re behind the times and you should avoid them like the plague.



5. A sure way to test whether this adviser is going to stick to their promises in the future is to give them a test now. The adviser who calls nearest to 4 will turn up on time, do what they say they are going to do and finish what they start – it’s simply the way they’ll be programmed (for more on this look up DISC Profiling).