Financial Planning Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do you charge for financial planning?
The hourly rate is included in our Terms of Business however this doesn’t tell you much about the total cost as plans can take longer or shorter timeframes to complete depending on the complexity of your finances and the scope of work. So that you have complete certainty on the cost in advance we ask you to complete a factfind. This allows us to make a good estimate of the time involved and we give you a flat fee for the plan. If you decide not to proceed there is no charge for our time up to this point. If you decide to proceed the flat fee applies unless something is omitted from your factfind (for example you have a defined benefit pension rather than a defined contribution pension) which requires additional work or if additional work is requested during the assignment.
2. What do we need to provide?
You need to send us a recent payslip for each earner in the plan and complete a factfind where you detail your personal circumstances as well as your income, living expenses, assets and liabilities as well as the repayment terms of loans and contributions, if any, to pensions, savings or investments.
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 we ask you if your employer provides Income Protection and if so what is the cover amount and deferral period, you could respond “75% of base salary with deferral period 6 months”. If instead of answering the query you send us a copy of your employers Group Income Protection policy to review then we charge for time spent on 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.
The query document must be completed in full by all parties to the plan i.e. we don’t accept one query document for person A and one from person B.
*in order to protect your information from unauthorised access we never click on external links
3. How many scenarios does the plan include?
The fee covers the base plan and up to five scenarios.
4. Will it help us to determine when we can retire?
Yes, we use your nominated retirement age to model your retirement and then do a ‘what if we retired at X age”. We can discuss what you would like in this regard.
5. Will all our pensions, savings and contributions be included, both individually and as a household?
Yes. We do that as standard but we can only work with the information we have. If you don’t tell us about it then it won’t be included.
6. Will you illustrate how changes to pension contributions would affect our retirement age and income?
Yes. We do that as standard.
7. 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.
8. When 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 brief summary of inputs to the model and assumptions used as well as our step plan of recommendations and the output report for each scenario.
9. Are there any other charges?
Once we deliver the plan you can pay the agreed fee and that is the end of the engagement. 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 within 60 days. If you don’t provide what is required to establish the product/s within 60 days, 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 all information is not provided for the review or if additional work is requested at review we bill for our time spent on this.
