Our Services
In financial terms everyone
goes through the same lifetime journey. You work to earn money, spend some,
save some until you’ve got enough to stop working and then you need to make
sure your savings will last till you die. Planning makes the journey shorter,
cheaper and safer – and that’s where we come in.
We are Financial Planners & Advisers. As Financial Planners we help you stand back, decide on your long term personal financial goals and the steps necessary to achieve them. But without money you can’t save so, as Financial Advisers we advise on how to safeguard income and savings with risk reduction measures such as insurance and investment diversity. The work we do for a particular client depends on where they are in their financial planning journey, on their circumstances and their attitude to planning and risk. Our motto is ‘Informed clients make better decisions’.
We are Financial Planners & Advisers. As Financial Planners we help you stand back, decide on your long term personal financial goals and the steps necessary to achieve them. But without money you can’t save so, as Financial Advisers we advise on how to safeguard income and savings with risk reduction measures such as insurance and investment diversity. The work we do for a particular client depends on where they are in their financial planning journey, on their circumstances and their attitude to planning and risk. Our motto is ‘Informed clients make better decisions’.
Your earning ability is
your biggest asset so for clients during their working years we help them
construct a suitable safety net of insurance and then help them gradually
deconstruct it by reducing their insurance as savings build up and children
become less dependent. The cost of our advice is normally covered by the
commission paid to us by the insurance companies.
What we do is to go through different ‘nasty’ situations and ask you what the minimum cash sum is that your family would need in each. Then we produce a straightforward report recommending which type of insurance and which insurance company to use. If the cost is too much then we’ll show you how to scale back and every second year we go through the same exercise to check that the figures are still correct. Although we suggest everyone goes through a comprehensive check, there are some circumstances (for example clients with children from a previous relationship, or clients with occupations or activities that make them difficult to insure) where we only look at one particular aspect of their insurance safety net. See a description of some of our clients: Families with Children; Second Marriages.
How much should you save for retirement – and how? We help our clients work out how much income they’ll need when they retire and then we use special software to estimate a target capital figure and the amount of monthly savings to reach that figure.
KiwiSaver will be an important part of these calculations and we advise on which funds are most appropriate for different clients depending on their ages, their retirement age and their attitude to risk. Our advice on savings and KiwiSaver is normally free to our insurance clients and is subject to an hourly rate for non insurance clients. Checking their investment progress is an important part of the client reviews that we carry out every year. See a description of some of our clients: Families with Children |
It isn’t just investing that’s important, it’s the balance between investing and spending. This is an area of particular interest to us and one that Glyn feels very strongly about. Money is there to be used and we believe that one of the most valuable services we offer to retired clients is helping them manage their money. For example the rate of spending should be higher in early retirement even if it means eating into capital.
We give each client an individual plan which spreads their investments widely and matches their annual spending with the amount of capital they have. Every year we check their plan with each client and help them decide when to spend, when to be cautious and how much they can afford to give away. See a description of some of our clients: Retired, Farming Families
This is a different situation and requires a different approach. We firstly consider how lump sum investment will affect a client’s retirement needs and produce an investment plan which is appropriate to the client’s time frame. Having secured the client’s retirement needs, if there is significant capital left over our (unusual) advice is that we think the surplus should be spent for the ‘now’ and not invested for the ‘future’. All the scientific advice is that money spend on ‘experiences’ produces a higher degree of satisfaction than money spent on ‘things’! But we still produce written advice because our experience is that a plan is needed to monitor spending in the same way as growth is monitored.
See a description of some of our clients: Retired
These situations are unusual. Farmers have the same need of advice on insurance, savings and investment as any other clients although the advice might need to be more specialised. But the problems of succession are unique to the farming community. It involves lifestyle as well as financial decisions. It involves a balance between how much the older generation needs for retirement and how much of their capital gain they are prepared to give away to children. And of course it involves decisions about how assets shall be split and how to avoid ill feeling that can last for generations.
The best thing to do is have a chat with Glyn – he’s been giving advice on farm succession for almost 40 years. See a description of some of our clients: Farming Families |
What happens when you come to see us?
The first meeting is free
and doesn’t need to last too long because it’s really just a way of finding out
if your situation is one in which we can help. From then on it depends on your
circumstances and the way in which you want us to help.
If it turns out that there is something we can do to help then we’ll discuss it further to determine your circumstances and your goals and will put our advice in writing for you to go through before making any decisions. Straightforward family insurance and savings advice doesn’t take long but lump sum investment, business insurance and business succession are more involved and almost always need several meetings.
If it turns out that there is something we can do to help then we’ll discuss it further to determine your circumstances and your goals and will put our advice in writing for you to go through before making any decisions. Straightforward family insurance and savings advice doesn’t take long but lump sum investment, business insurance and business succession are more involved and almost always need several meetings.
