What — Pelican Financial Planning

Financial Planning

At the core of financial planning is spending the time to find out about you, your needs, your wants, your goals, your concerns, starting with a blank page and letting you guide the discovery process. So the starting point is a Discovery meeting, held at our expense and with no obligation on you to use our services.

As this is the start of a long term relationship, it is important that we are able to see that we can add value to your situation and for you to decide if you feel you can work with us long term. Without those two things any long term financial planning relationship won’t work.

Any plan is only as good as the point in time that it is created. Your situation will change; your objectives will change; the world around you will change; your plan is likely to need to change over time as well and it is our belief that having a scheduled process for review, even when everything seems to be going smoothly, means catching those changes before they move from changes to problems.

Step 1

Establish your goals in life – short, medium and long term

Step 2

Work out what assets and liabilities you have – write them down

Step 3

Evaluate your current financial position – how close are you to achieving your goals?

Step 4

Develop your plan – create a “route map” for achieving your different goals

Step 5

Implement your plan – make the changes and make it happen

Step 6

Monitor and review your plan at least yearly and make adjustments when needed

Financial Advice

The distinction between financial planning and financial advice is not necessarily as clear as some suggest however, we believe that there is a distinction that can be made between an all-encompassing financial planning approach and a specific piece of financial advice related to a particular immediate concern or objective.

We recognise that there are times when what you need is not necessarily that all-encompassing financial planning approach. This doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t benefit from financial planning but that possibly the “When” is not right.

We see this for example where we work with members of statutory pension schemes such as the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, NHS Pension scheme or Local Government Pension Scheme. Often the need for advice is driven by a major change such as when the McCloud judgement came through, or by receipt of a Pension Savings Statement informing you that you have exceeded the Annual Allowance for tax relieved pension savings in a year. The priority is accessing the expertise and advice needed to address the immediate issue and, until this is done, it is difficult to look further out and be able to commit to broader longer term planning.

This doesn’t mean that we are prepared to take on all one-off pieces of financial advice. Where a one-off piece of advice involves an investment strategy or financial product you will need to be prepared to commit to having this reviewed on an annual basis. If the “scandal” of endowment mortgages taught us anything it was that not reviewing investments or financial products is a bad idea. Making an investment in the hope that, 25 years in the future, if you never ever looked at it again, what you had done was going to turn out right, isn’t going to work.

What we don’t do

It is as important to understand what we don’t, or won’t, do as it is to understand what we do and how we do it.

We won’t do something just because you want us to; if we think that something you ask us to do is wrong, then we will say so, because you employ us to advise you not just take orders;
We won’t pretend that we can predict what will happen to investments or investment markets in the short term or whether something has “peaked” or “bottomed out”;
We won’t try and pick the next “winner” and bet your money on it;
We won’t pretend we can do something or that we have the right knowledge to advise you in an area if we can’t;
We won’t shirk from telling you if something isn’t right or won’t work;
We won’t make it difficult for you to leave us if you aren’t happy with what we are doing or don’t feel you are getting value for money from our services;