Financial Planning Frequently Asked Questions
1. What do we need to provide?
You need to complete a factfind where you detail your personal circumstances and your income, living expenses, assets and liabilities as well as the repayment terms of loans, and contributions if any, to pensions, savings or investments. We will also ask you for a recent payslip for each earner in the plan.
If we have queries on any of this we will send you a query document. You need to answer each query in the document rather than sending us a document or a link to a document for us to review. For example, if you own shares and we ask you for the value of these shares you need to tell us the (usually Dollar or Euro) amount. If instead of answering the query you send us a statement from your stockbroker then we charge for time spent reviewing this at the rate show in our Terms of Business in addition to the plan fee. The same goes for pensions, investments etc. The fee does not include the cost of reviewing third party documents.
2. How long does the process take?
How long the process takes will be largely dependent on the speed of provision of information. If you respond within 24 hours to our requests for information the process may take only around two weeks. It’s worth noting that the most labour intensive part of the process is the initial plan so it is worth taking some time to do it properly.
3. What objectives will the plan cover
Whatever you need. Usually that includes retirement planning, investment advice, funding third level fees as well as reviewing the adequacy of your family protection, and you can specify additional objectives which are particular to your situation.
4. How many scenarios does the plan include?
The fee covers the base plan and up to five scenarios.
5. Will it help us to determine when we can retire?
Yes, we use your nominated retirement age to model your retirement. We’ll show you what you need to do to achieve this and we can do a ‘what if we retired at X age”. We can discuss what you would like in this regard.
6. Will all our pensions, savings and investments and contributions to same be included as well as other income we have such as rental income?
Yes, we do that as standard.
7. Will you illustrate how changes to pension contributions would affect our retirement age and income?
Yes, we do that as standard.
8. Will you outline the key assumptions (growth, inflation, investment returns etc) and can you run a more conservative version?
Yes, we do that as standard.
9. What do we receive arising from the exercise?
After the meeting where we present the cashflow model and talk you through it we send you a summary of inputs to the model and assumptions used as well as our step plan of recommendations and the output report for each scenario modelled.
10. Are there any other charges?
Once we deliver the plan you can pay the agreed fee and walk away with your plan. Alternatively you may want us to assist you with implementation. If you ask us to implement the recommendations in the plan, such as arranging a pension, investment or a life policy, there is no charge for this providing that it proceeds to completion. If you don’t proceed to establish the product/s, then as well as the cost of the plan we bill for the time spent on this at the rates shown in our Terms of Business. Minimum investment amounts apply.
For reasons which are outlined in detail in section 19 of our Terms of Business we recommend that your plan is reviewed at least once per year. Estimated hours for a financial planning review is two hours at a reduced financial planning review hourly rate which is detailed in section 19 of the Terms of Business. If additional work is requested at review stage we bill for time spent on this.
11. Why should I do a Financial Plan
For most people the products they have were sold to them purely for commission. If you use our Financial Planning service you will see that a lot of the advice we give you doesn’t benefit us at all. The reason we can do that and have a viable business is because you are paying us a fee. This is the only way to get unbiased advice in Ireland.
If you are interested in exploring this further please book a Zoom call with us using this link.
