First Financial Coach

Investing you money nowadays is such a complex and sophisticated activity that it takes a professional to truly understand all its subtleties and thus identify the premium investments. Here’s how a financial services company can give your investment planning the professional factor that helps maintain the value of your assets and plan for your desired quality of life.

Effective investment takes education, training, knowledge and experience – something that many of the professionals active in the financial planning field can offer. Even if you have a strong understanding of business and economics, it still makes sense to focus on your core job and allow financial professionals to take care of your investment planning. Here’s how they work.

Firstly, a financial services advisor helps you to define your goals. These aims will cover, for example,what assets, such as property, you wish to acquire? What future income streams you’ll need to maintain your lifestyle including important matters such as paying for your childrens’ education and your retirement?

By taking into account such factors as your income, assets, obligations such as mortgages and other debts, your advisor can determine the optimum sums you can invest over various timeframes to make sure your goals are met.

This involves developing a strategy to attain your goals. A strategy is a long term approach that’s formulated after a thorough analysis of all relevant factors. Your situation and goals plus the business environment including such factors as the investment situation and tax legislation will all be considered.

Next, you need to select the types of investments that align with your strategy. With so many types of investment on offer all differing in terms of timeframe and return it’s hard to make a decision.

Some of the choices you may have to make include choosing between individual stocks or investing in a mutual fund or unit trust. Some individual stocks are riskier than others but can offer a chance of high capital gains; whilst tracker funds and unit trusts should provide a safer and more modest return as the risk is spread out over a portfolio.

Then again treasury bonds or gilts sound safe. However, their value varies according to the interest rate. If interest rates rise, the value of existing bonds fall, lowering the value of your portfolio. A good financial advisor will be able to put together for you a balanced portfolio of investments designed to attain your goals.

Essentially, your financial services advisors is using his expertise and experience to help you make informed decisions that will influence you present and future wealth, your standard of living and your peace of mind.

He can guide towards investments that are expected to be less risky and fit in with your strategic goals. (And equally importantly steer you away from those which could bring you grief however promising they may look).

Ultimately, your future prosperity depends on the action you take now to make sure you money is invested wisely and offers a positive return.

Other than investment planning, you financial advisor will also make sure you don’t pay more tax than you should and that your insurance coverage is adequate for the needs of you and your family.

You can find a number of reputable financial services companies in London and the Home Counties. Just search online and you’ll find hundreds of firms. However, to make sure you get quality advice from a reputable advisor, you need to choose carefully.

By using the internet, you can find reputable financial services companies in London and the Home Counties. You can also use the net to check on the credentials of your London financial advisors. At the least, your financial advisors must be FSA authorised which guarantees certain standards. This is easy to check by visiting the FSA’s website or by calling their consumer hotline. For even greater confidence, you should also check your financial services advisors have staff holding chartered financial planner status.

Usually people don’t choose financial advisors; they simply get in touch with them. Many a times in some private banks you will find a super consultant or super advisors who will sell you everything like insurance, credit card, and even mutual funds. Banks are distributor of mutual fund and not the advisors.

Mind it; if you are investing advice from any bank you actually take advice from a distributor and it that case it is not necessary that you get a fair and quality advice.

An adviser should be one who can provide his customers with real value based advice rather than simply pushing sales in order to earn a better commission. Advisor’s role assumes significant importance in an exuberant scenario like the present one, when it is easy for investors to lose track of their objectives and make wrong investment decisions. Conversely, an association with the wrong investment advisor can spell disaster for investors. We present a few pointers which will help investors gauge if they are with the wrong investment advisor.

If the Advisor is offering rewards in terms of payback.

Select an advisor for his ability to recommend the right investment avenues and manage your investments rather than his willingness to refund commission. By offering payback the advisor is not doing justice to his to his work as he is luring you towards doing that investment. This specifies that an advisor is putting your money at risk by giving you commission.

This practice (widely prevalent despite being explicitly prohibited) among investment advisors is to rebate a part of commission earned, back to investors i.e. the investor is ‘rewarded’ for getting invested. What investors fail to realize is that the commission offered by the advisor is actually reward for taking more risk. Wealth creation for investors should come from the investments made and not commissions. Select an advisor for his ability to recommend the right investment avenues and manage your investments rather than his willingness to refund commission.

The advisor only advices top few funds most of the time.

Most of the time an advisor will suggest you some fund and will show you its annual returns. Most of the top ranking funds are sectoral funds and they carry a certain amount of risk. Usually sector funds being a fund with major allocation to specific sectors they are high risk funds. Many times in order to generate large funds from the market the fund houses have fallen prey to herd mentality and launched similar offerings in quick succession. The banks and investment advisors have played their part by indiscreetly pushing these products since they get better commission.

Think again before you take suggestion from such advisors.

If the advisor always have an NFO to pitch for.

Investment advisors have earned well through the mutual fund New Fund Offer’s by convincing investors that it is cheaper to invest during the NFO stage. But be careful this is not the truth. Mutual fund distributors and advisors mostly take benefit of the lack of knowledge on investor’s part by pitching the mutual fund NFOs as stock IPOs, distributors have only discredited themselves by not being true to their investors. Advisor should only recommend a new fund if it add value to the investor’s portfolio or is a unique investment proposition. Any advisor who is true to the profession will pitch for an existing scheme which has a good track record and proven rather than a similar scheme in its IPO stage.

If Advisor’s role is restricted to delivery and pick up of forms.

Investment advisor’s primary role includes creating a portfolio for the investor based on his needs, risk profile and successfully managing the same. While maintaining high service standards is pertinent, it shouldn’t gain precedence over the advice part. Most of the advisors I have seen are usually working for big distributors such as banks, big brokerage houses. The main work for them is meeting the targets rather than provide value base advisory service. Independent individual Investment advisors prefer to make their work simpler by showing them selves only when they had to collect the form.

“Selecting an investment adviser/stockbroker can be one of the most important decisions you can make for your family. If you choose incorrectly, the consequences can be devastating.”

In the world of today, when finances have become necessary to cater to all of our needs, great financial planning is what can help you to reduce your financial worries. Finances are essential to lead a happy life so what could be better than having an advisor help you with your finances, a person whom you can really trust? We know that the stock market has become the prime choice to invest money for people who want to make huge gains in a short period of time. However, it is also true that investing in the stock market comes with many associated risks where one can lose all of his/her hard-earned money due to making a wrong decision.

The stock market is risky but this alone cannot stop investors from investing their money in it. The most wise and serious investors choose to play the game under the guidance of their financial advisors who help them to achieve their financial goals. The fact that most investors lack the time and essential knowledge about the stock market proves the importance of hiring financial advisors whose main goal is to help their clients make decisions that are related to their investment goals.

Financial advisors provide useful tips and advice about stock market investments which can save the future of their clients who otherwise can suffer by making a simple mistake. Small cap stocks are generally considered to be highly volatile which makes it crucial to have the specific knowledge about the ever changing stock market conditions. However, you can ensure financial security even in the stock market provided you find a financial advisor that has the experience and expertise to handle your particular stock needs. You should look for a financial advisor with the qualifications and skills to compete in the stock market who can easily understand your objectives.

Although it is impossible to predict the stock market’s future gains or losses, you can control most of the things involved in this risky business by just employing a good financial advisor.