What is a Financial Advisor?

It is quite simply a professional you pay to provide you with financial advice. You would normally engage with a financial advisor to talk about your short, medium and long term financial objectives and create a plan to meet those objectives. A good advisor will get to know you well, make you feel comfortable, establish trust and understand your spending habits, income and assets.

 

Independent v Restricted or Tied

Milestone Financial Planning are completely independent. This means we can search the whole of the financial services market to find products, investments and other financial planning strategies that best suit our client’s needs. We always act in our client’s best interests and we do not receive commission from any provider or organisations for recommending certain products or investments. A restricted or tied advisor will only be authorised to recommended a limited number of investments and financial products to their clients – anything they recommend only has to be “suitable” and not the best match for your needs.

 

What services does a Financial Advisor offer?

The best advisors will be able to recommend and implement a plan across the whole of your life. At Milestone we employ the use of investment platforms, much like online banking software, so that our clients can keep an eye on the performance of their various investments and financial planning strategies. Here are the main services usually offered;

 

– Budgeting

Understanding your spending and saving habits. Helping you to save for that dream home or world cruise.

 

– Investment Advice

The job of a financial advisor is to asset your objectives, risk attitude to investments and then recommend investment funds tailored to your goals.

 

– Retirement Planning

Reviewing your current pension savings, identifying any shortfalls and designing a plan to ensure that you have enough income when you decide to stop working.

 

– Estate Planning

This might be helping you to utilise allowances to pass on your wealth to your family in the most tax efficient way or looking at more complex estate planning such as Trusts.

 

– Tax Planning

Working with you and maybe your accountant and helping to ensure that all your personal and business (if applicable) tax allowances are used to reduce your tax liability.

 

– Cash Flow Analysis or Modelling

Forecasting retirement income or investment returns to a target date and checking whether or not any recommendation made actually meets given objectives within a certain timeframe.