In times gone by, a financial adviser was someone who simply found the best financial product for your needs. Now that role has changed enormously and helping people select products is only one small part of what we do.
Financial planners today don’t start new client relationships with conversations about money. Instead they spend very valuable time, really getting to know clients and many times we help our clients to get to know themselves better.
Good financial plans are based on your goals, aspirations and ambitions but many times you will never have properly thought about them. So, the first role of financial planners today is to help people identify their goals and dreams for the future and give them a real destination to aim for.
It’s all well and good having lofty dreams and ambitions, but equally important is how achievable they are, and what price needs to be paid to attain them. This is critical work carried out by financial planners. Using future cashflow software, people’s dreams are grounded in the reality of life.
This helps them make important choices between living life only in the moment today, or choosing their lifestyle for all of their life.
When things go wrong and clients wish to blow up their plans, the financial adviser is the voice of reason; the calming influence and the expert guide keeping a long-term perspective. Humans tend to do the wrong thing at the wrong time. This means they sell assets when they are cheap and buy them when they are expensive. In general, people get their market timing all wrong. Our job is to tell you the key is time in the market, not market timing and mostly the best advice will be to stay invested.
Good advice around family budgeting can yield enormous results over the long-term as people actively manage their expenses and stop wasting money. Financial advisers help you to pull all your financial strands together giving you an expert in your corner who guides you in a very complex area of your life.