Our financial planning process
At Carpenter Box Financial Advisers we work collaboratively with you to identify the most appropriate way for you to achieve your financial goals. Our team will help you to gain a better understanding of the options available, before advising on and implementing a suitable financial plan to reach your goals.
Our six step financial planning process is outlined below.
1. Make contact
The first step is reaching out. You can call us, drop us an email or fill out the contact form on our website.
If you’re not quite ready yet, why not sign up to our newsletter, look through our various blogs and resources or follow us on social media? You can find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
2. Understand your needs
At an initial meeting at our cost with one of our friendly and highly experienced independent financial advisers, we will aim to understand more about you, where you are financially, what existing products you already have in place and importantly, what you are looking to achieve in the future.
To assist this meeting, your adviser will need information on your current assets, liabilities, income and outgoings. These are essential in creating a good quality financial plan.
The vast majority of financial decisions involve a trade-off between risks and comparing these to potential rewards. Once your adviser has an understanding of your circumstances, they will be well placed to discuss the risks that are in place with your current circumstances and seek to understand your own views of the risks that you are prepared to accept. This is a crucial part of any financial planning exercise.
Armed with the information above, your adviser is in a position to talk about our service, providing initial thoughts on how we might be able to assist you and agree on the order of priority of your financial goals.
3. Define your goals
Your adviser will also be able to discuss assumptions that may be used in preparing your financial plan. This might be around future inflation, investment returns, or future savings levels for example.
4. Research and analysis
Any good financial plan requires a detailed analysis of your existing arrangements. Once you have agreed to our terms and engaged our services, our team of paraplanners will undertake a full review of your existing financial products. This includes looking at the charges you currently pay, the performance of any investments/pensions, and comparing this to your views of risk and what you are looking to achieve.
After analysing the current plans, the paraplanner will formulate a recommendation report. Where this involves new financial plans, they will research the open market for the most suitable options.
The resulting recommendation report should summarise the analysis carried out and clearly state the recommendations made.
5. Delivery and implementation
Once you have read your recommendation report, your financial adviser will meet with you again to talk through the salient points, answer any questions you may have and, when you are happy to proceed, complete the relevant paperwork.
Our administrative support team will then track applications and keep you updated with progress.
6. Monitor and review
A good financial plan is a living thing. It requires ongoing monitoring to ensure that the plans that have been put in place remain on track and suitable for you.
Your own circumstances change, investment trends evolve and legislation constantly updates. Each of these can throw a good plan into chaos.
As independent financial advisers, we can’t stress enough the importance of regular engagement with your financial adviser. Research shows this will lead to significantly improved long-term outcomes as the financial plan is tweaked to remain in line with your objectives.
The value of investments can go down as well as up and you may get back less than the amount invested.
