I’ve known Paul since childhood! He advised my father and so when my husband Tom and I got married we turned to him.
We were looking for advice on everything from investing to pension planning to financial protection and long-term savings plans for childcare and private education. The whole approach!
Another financial adviser we spoke to tried to give us a sales pitch every time we went to see him. But Paul was completely different to that; he suggested a number of things that we needed to think about and told us he could help us but that there was no pressure to go with him and we could go away and think about it.
The initial process was in the same vein. He focused the conversation on us and where we wanted to go in life. He asked us about our current financial position and asked us things like did we want to stay in London long-term, were we planning on having children, did we want them to have private education, because this of course would impact our earning potential.
It actually felt a little like a counselling session! We discussed things that we’d not actually addressed as a couple before, which was very helpful because it’s hard to talk about these things on your own, you need a third party to raise these questions and this enabled us to gain real clarity about where we were going.
Being able to articulate our short, medium and long-term financial goals enabled Paul to look at creating financial solutions to achieving those goals.
Paul asked us about our risk appetite, and we went through the investment options looking at the risk strategy of each in more detail.
Tom is a lawyer and I work for the public sector so we both have good pensions, but we were concerned that we weren’t on track and that we wouldn’t have saved enough at the stage we were at.
We live in London, have a massive mortgage and a lot of debt at the time and we didn’t feel as if we had the security – we felt as if the financial risk we were exposed to was disproportionate to our income level. The big question for us was ‘have we over stretched ourselves?’
We’re both quite reasonable at maths, but working out cumulative growth is a struggle for anyone, and understanding how much you need in older age is not something you really know!
So we got into a conversation about financial protection and what would happen if either of us died or became too ill to work. We both have fairly good benefits packages at work, but Paul ascertained that we needed life insurance on top of this. He also reassured us that we hadn’t purchased products we didn’t need.
We both felt cautious about being sold things, because that’s what you expect from a financial adviser, but Paul isn’t like that. He has a very honest and frank style, and doesn’t give you the hard sales pitch, and he’s not flashy.
We needed someone who could give us a really personal approach and that’s exactly what we got with Paul. We feel much more confident about our finances now and reassured. We have a long-term financial plan now and a clear, achievable financial future!
Past performance is not indicative of future performance. The value of an investment with St. James's Place will be directly linked to the performance of the funds you select and the value can therefore go down as well as up. You may get back less than you invested.
