Speaking to loved ones about what’s going on with our bank accounts can be tough enough, so it’s understandable that the idea of talking to a professional financial adviser could bring many people out in a dread-filled sweat. But there’s really no need to worry, says Matthew Beck, a chartered financial planner at Smith & Pinching. This isn’t school, you’re not going to be told off for your past money-making decisions.
“It’s not about having a teacher-student mentality where you’re grading someone on what they’ve done so far,” he says reassuringly. “It’s about coaching them in terms of how they think about money, how they think about investing, and how they might think about structuring their financial plan going forward, giving them options, giving them explanations on how things work, and guiding them.”
It actually sounds a lot like therapy. “You almost sit like the client’s family chief financial officer, in that, it often isn’t just a chat about what the stock market is doing,” agrees Beck. “A lot of the conversations I’ll have with clients are about their families, marriages, divorces, worries they have for grandchildren, how they’re preparing for their children’s futures.
“It covers such a wide base beyond just financials, because money in itself is meaningless if it doesn’t have some purpose. So it’s our job to really understand the purpose for different clients’ money.”
Considering speaking to a financial adviser? Here are a few things to be aware of…
Pick a financial adviser you can trust
“Reach out to a chartered financial planner. It’s always good to do a bit of due diligence and make sure they have the right qualifications and experience,” says Beck. But also, “be driven by that human connection as well. Do you feel you can trust that person to have real conversations with?”
He says if that means having two or three conversations with different advisers to find the right one for you, so be it. “Most financial advisers are aiming to work with clients not on a transactional basis, but on a lifelong basis,” he explains. “So finding a financial planner you can trust and open up to about family dynamics and past experiences with money, and can have those real conversations with, is really important.”
Meet however suits you
For a first chat, face-to-face, on the phone or via video call, whatever works for you, should be fine. However, “when you do get to the point of really wanting to talk about someone’s life and their longer-term financial plan, in person or over video, where you can have that eye contact, is really important in terms of building that trust between the adviser and the client,” recommends Beck.
Establish what you need to have prepared
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It will largely depend on the financial planner you’re speaking to, so before tracking down a decade’s worth of payslips, ask what they’d like you to bring along.
Smith & Pinching, for instance, send out a checklist that highlights the information it’s helpful for them to have from the off. “A breakdown of your income, breakdown of expenditure, often, advisers will provide expenditure questionnaires, a breakdown of assets, so where you’ve got savings, your pensions, investments, property, things like that,” notes Beck, who adds: “Something I regularly send new clients is a goals and values questionnaire. It’s to take pressure off the financials and get people thinking more long term and about what they want their lives to look like.”
He says this can give people an overarching sense of what they want to achieve with their money, and what’s most important in their lives. “We ask questions like, ‘If you knew you were going to pass away in 10 years, what would you want to fill your life with over that decade?”
You don’t have to be a financial whizz
A degree in finance is not remotely required of you. “Often people go into the initial meetings with a concern that they should know more, and therefore the meeting will highlight some lack of knowledge on their part and they’ll feel embarrassed by that,” says Beck. “But the most important part of the initial conversations is really just to understand what that person is concerned about with their own finances.”
“We do have a lack of financial education in the UK – it isn’t something that is taught at the national curriculum level, so every adviser expects that most people aren’t going to know the inner wranglings of pension regulation and things like that,” he adds. “The conversation is understanding where that client is and where they would like to get to. It is then the job of the adviser to actually provide the guidance and assistance they need, not the technical aspects of pensions, ISAs, insurance, inheritance tax planning etc.”
Questions or no questions
Scared you don’t know what to ask? Or are fully prepped with a long list of questions you want to pepper the adviser with? Either stance is fine – this is your chance to find out as much as you need or want to know about your financial situation, and what’s possible in the future.
“An important skill of a good financial adviser is actually not to have a too-structured meeting format and effectively be able to control the conversation in whatever way that the client needs,” says Beck.