Everything You Need To Know
- Financial Planning is not rocket science. There are complications, but these are usually reserved for people with high incomes, large estates, or have some other complication like money held offshore or in other currencies.
- You don’t need an adviser to do the basics: Spend less than you earn. Protect against disaster. Invest wisely.
- Anyone can benefit from planning done well. Do you have the time and inclination to look into investment types, platforms, funds, or different insurances? Many people do not, and they can benefit from the input of an adviser.
- Coaching is the future. Very difficult to coach yourself, so anyone can benefit from the external input. 90% of advice done right is behavioural coaching. It’s helping people to understand their motivations, challenging misconceptions and helping them to rethink those misconceptions.
Everything You Need To Do
- Examine your motivation for seeking advice. What was the trigger for seeking advice? If you feel like you need support to stick to a budget or get started investing regularly and consistently, then consider a financial coach. If you’re certain that the help you need is likely to require detailed examination of your existing holdings, and clear steps to take including investment approaches, choice of wrappers and tax optimisation, then you should probably talk to a financial planner.
- How to search for a professional. No central database of financial coaches – going to need to resort to Google. Try ‘financial coach and your town’ or ‘money coach and your town’. For regulated advisers, there are more options, see links in Resources.
- Define your reasons for advice, but be open to other angles. Make sure your prospective adviser takes the time in a free initial meeting to determine the scope of the advice. If they talk about solutions in the first meeting – that’s a red flag. Initial discovery session(s) should be all about you and what you want out of the process and out of life. Think of it as a courtship – would you want to be linked to this person for a long time.
- Consider Meaningful Academy. I think of what I do in three levels
- Free tier – broadcasting
- Jacksons for full regulated financial planning advice
- Middle ground is Meaningful Academy (Coupon: PODCAST)
