Financial planning

Financial planning that starts with your life, not your money

You've sold the business. Or the inheritance has landed. Or retirement moved from an abstraction to a date you can count towards on a calendar.

Something changed, and now the money needs to do a job it wasn't doing before.

So you started looking for a financial planner. And found forty firms in Sussex who all say the same three things: independent, trusted, tailored. Nothing on any of their websites tells you what would happen if you picked up the phone.

Here's what happens if you pick up ours.

First, a conversation that costs you nothing

Thirty minutes. Phone, video, or one of our seven offices across Sussex, Surrey and Kent.

You tell us what's happened and what you're trying to work out. We ask questions. At the end of it we tell you honestly whether we can help and how, or whether you'd be better served somewhere else.

Some people we point elsewhere. That's a better outcome for everyone than taking on work we're not right for.

Then, the Financial Health Check

This is the part most firms don't describe, so we will.

We map everything. The pensions you've lost track of, the ones from three jobs ago. What you own, what you owe, what it's all costing you in charges you may never have seen. Your tax position. How much risk you're carrying, which is rarely the amount you think.

Then we tell you where you stand.

What you can do. What you can't. And more often than people expect, that you can do more than you feared.

The Health Check is paid work. We agree the fee before anything starts, and you're not committed to anything afterwards. The report is yours whatever you decide next, including deciding to take it somewhere else.

Then, a plan you can follow

Written in English. Every recommendation explained, every trade-off named, so you know what you're agreeing to and why.

And then we stay with it. Markets move, tax rules shift, and lives rarely run to plan. We check in to make sure the plan still fits the life it was built for.

The mistake almost nobody expects to be making

When people come to us worried about risk, they're usually worried about the wrong risk.

The fear is losing money in markets. The more common problem is holding too much in cash for too long, watching inflation take a quiet percentage every year, and calling it the safe option.

Being too careful has a cost. It just doesn't arrive as a statement showing a loss.

An independent financial advisor's job is not to talk you into risk you can't stomach. It's to show you what each choice actually costs you over twenty years, then let you decide with your eyes open.

What this is really for

A plan isn't a document. It's the reason you stop running the numbers again at midnight.

It's knowing the answer when your daughter asks whether you can help with the deposit for a house. It's booking the trip without a fortnight of hesitation first. It's the difference between hoping it works out and knowing where you stand.

Live well. Today and tomorrow.