What is the Financial Planning process?
Engaging with a professional firm can sometimes be quite daunting, in particular when it comes to something as personal as finance and money.
Our financial planning process involves taking time to understand your requirements and gather the relevant information, staying in touch to refine and update detailed plans as your situation evolves. The aim of our continued support is to help bring your plans to life, so you can have confidence in your financial security, whatever the future may bring.
Step 1) Getting in touch
Whether you wish to speak with a particular planner or have a general enquiry please call your nearest office or email info@acumenfp.com and our team will be happy to help. View our office hours.
Step 2) The Initial Meeting
All initial meetings are at our cost and are available online or in person.
The initial meeting usually lasts an hour and provides the opportunity to discuss particular issues or solutions you may require. You can also use this time to ask any questions about our team, services or fees.
Depending on your requirements, you may be asked to provide relevant paperwork in advance of this meeting. Initial meetings provide all the necessary answers to establish if we can assist you and importantly, that you feel confident in our team and are happy to take things forward.
Step 3) The Proposal
Should you wish to engage in our services, a proposal will be sent to you outlining matters discussed, explaining our services, fees, and next steps. Once confirmed, our team will collate the relevant information and work towards creating your report, recommendations, and solutions.
Step 4) The Follow-up Meeting
If you are happy with the proposal, a second meeting will be arranged to run through the details and gather the relevant information in order to take things forward.
Step 5) The Annual Review
From the moment we book you in for your annual planning meeting, we’re hard at work.
This starts with the Paraplanners, the team behind the scenes who orchestrates the pre-review process, and their first port of call is to liaise with the Administration team.
The team gathers information from the various providers we work with. One of the most important pieces of information is your portfolio performance, and we use this as well as historic plan information to give you a range of long and short-term results during the meeting. The administration team also prepares any paperwork you may be required to complete or sign.
Once this has been arranged, it is then returned and passed back to the Paraplanners. At this stage, a pre-meeting spreadsheet will be completed, as well as a breakdown of all your finances, from income and expenditure to all your assets and holdings. The next step is getting this to you securely, and that’s where our client portal comes in.
We send the spreadsheet along with instructions in advance, to give you time to go over all the information and make any amendments needed. Once you have returned all the documents, the Paraplanner updates the systems, making sure everything we hold on file is correct and up-to-date so the Planner has all the information for the upcoming meeting.
We now use this information to create a financial model of your current and future circumstances, again, you will be shown this during your meeting.
Step 6) The Ongoing Relationship
We keep in regular contact with all our clients and will meet with clients as often as they need to.
Take a look at just some of the benefits of using a financial planner, and discover how our financial planning process can bring you peace of mind and financial security.