How it works

What to expect from Belper IFS

As independent and professional financial advisers, our core focus is on providing the best advice and services possible to help you make the right choices about your financial future.

How it works

Our first step is to understand the heart of your enquiry and assess your current position during an initial review meeting.

For there, we’ll look to develop solutions that may include all your existing products, or a complete overhaul and replacement where necessary. We’ll tell you what we feel is good, bad or ugly with your current solutions, based on the evidence and or professional opinion.

We’ll devise a plan of action which places you and your financial aspirations at the forefront and only with your full agreement. However, if you agree with our findings, we can implement that solution independently.

After implementing your strategy, we offer ongoing, non-compulsory annual reviews, where we’ll look to ensure the agreed strategy remains suitable for you and your changing needs.

Life moves on and things change, like the way you feel, your attitude towards investment risk and financial legislation can change. Your solution may need tweaking because of this, and we’ll be there to guide you.

The nitty gritty

The first meeting

We offer an initial review meeting at no cost or obligation to you. This is informal, relaxed and takes roughly an hour, but we won’t rush or pressure you. We want to hear from you and learn about you. We take useful notes. It’s important we get to understand you, your thoughts, beliefs and goals. We’ll tell you more about us too.

We want to understand what your existing pension and investment arrangements look like, to establish if we can work together. We operate on a relationship basis with all our engaged clients.

At the end of that initial meeting, you’ll understand more about how we work, our preliminary thoughts and the options available for your existing or potential alternative solutions.

You’ll then leave to reflect before agreeing to engage us, or not see the merits of working with Belper IFS. You’ll know and understand the costs of engaging our services prior to signing any contracts for services with us.

Should you decide to engage our professional services, we’ll want to go into more technical depth with your existing pension and investments by contacting their providers to analyse the plans, their options and get to the bottom of whether they are suitable for you.

The devil is in the detail

The second meeting

At a second meeting (usually a few weeks later), we’ll present our preliminary findings on your existing arrangements, and gather more detailed information about you to see if these are suitable or not. This second meeting will set the course of direction and the final step of implementing your new financial plan. A fee for this meeting is covered in our standard Client Agreement found in our Document Library.

Into action

The third meeting

Once you decide to go ahead, we’ll hold a third meeting (if required). At this meeting, we’ll present full and formal advice, both verbally and in writing, for you to digest. You may choose to implement the agreed strategy if you feel comfortable. It may be able to stand alone, without needing any future maintenance or ongoing service. However, we always recommend annual reviews and we’ll build your solution according to whether you wish to carryon on using our our services to monitor your solution.

Aftercare

Optional ongoing service

Once your solution is in place, we’ll know that it was correct at the time of the formal implementation. However, as we said above, things change and you’ll never know for sure that your solution will remain the most suitable for your needs over your lifetime. Many things can affect this, from life events or changes in legislation to economic events like a recession or pandemic.

Most of our clients engage our fee-paying ongoing after services, where we conduct regular reviews (usually annually) to ensure your solution remains the most suitable. This involves assessing your financial position, thoughts and feelings each year to see if anything material has changed which may impact the solution, and adjusting things accordingly. Should we need to change the solution, this will be paid for within the cost of the ongoing service and documented for transparency. Details can be found in the Documents Library.

A solution built for use with our optional ongoing services may be different to a solution with no ongoing service included. Everyone’s different, but we find most of our clients like the extra security of having an ongoing relationship with an independent financial adviser to look after their futures. This is our preferred way of working with you.