An initial meeting with Woodward Financials are typically conducted via telephone or video call and are at our expense, they normally last 30-40 minutes.
The aim of the initial meeting is to understand why you feel you need a financial adviser and for us to give an indication of what the likely cost of advice would be for your needs, and whether we can offer you the same service we deliver to our existing clients, you can also use this meeting to decide if you would like us as your financial adviser.
With decades of investment experience and consistent investment performance in both rising and falling markets has led Woodward Financials to retains clients for many years as well as winning multiple advice and investment awards.
Woodward Financials are known for complex financial planning advice, tax mitigation and active investment management. Being this experienced means we are not budget financial advisers and are never going to be the lowest cost, but on the plus side we are not the most expensive.
Advice charges and investment fees have always been there, such as a pension or stocks and shares ISA, using an investment as an example the below shows how firms charge.
- Fees charged by financial advisers could charge by way of a fixed fee, hourly rate or most commonly a percentage of your investments.
- Fees charged by a platform is likely to be charged as a percentage.
- Fees charged by the investment fund, these again, are most likely to be a percentage.
Due to the wide range of advice Woodward Financials provides, we charge for our initial advice and for ongoing advice. Our fees and charges depend on the advice, e.g. we could charge an hourly rate, receive commission by the provider, charge a fixed broker fees for mortgages or a percentage for stockbroking and investing.
There are no charges for withdrawing money and we do have a reducing charging structure in place depending on the total investment amount and linking family accounts.
3% of your initial investment will be used to pay for initial advice and an annual charge of 1.25% will be charged for the ongoing advice and the relationship with your adviser, this is usually funded by selling a small percentage of your investments, or by using cash that has built up from dividends, how does this compare with other advice firms?
The industry standard charge by independent financial advisors is 3% but can be as much as 7%, the industry standard for ongoing financial advice is 1% but can be as high as 2%.
Good investment recommendations can easily offset slightly higher fees, inexperience and restricted advice firms should be at the lower end of the charging scale.
Like the image below indicates, you get what you pay for. A mistake many people make when seeking advice is contacting an adviser who is hiding behind a nice website, not realising they are a restricted advice firm or perhaps someone with only a few years of experience at best, always seek independent financial advice.
At Woodward Financials we pride ourselves on being different to many Financial Advisers, creating solutions for problems others can not solve, as well as this we are qualified Stockbrokers and also Mortgage brokers.
Giving good financial advice is usually centered around tax savings, such as mitigating inheritance tax, but there is so much more to advice than what is widely known.
Advice from Woodward Financials more than makes up for any advice fees, saving individuals anything from a few thousand to millions of pounds in tax savings. One free piece of advice, do not try and do financial planning yourself, even the very best of DIY investors miss out the most important parts, in some cases costing them or their families hundreds of thousands of pounds, a very costly mistake.
