How We Do Things
HOW WE DO THINGS
Financial Strategy & Planning
Whilst we can help a broad range of individuals, we have extensive expertise and experience working with:
- Employed professionals and executives
- Business owners
- Individuals and couples already retired
- Attorneys managing someone else’s affairs and/or someone with later life financial concerns
When we first meet we’re careful to ask relevant questions, listen carefully to your replies and openly discuss the challenges you might face.
Understanding your aims and rigorously analysing your financial situation allows us to explore the possibilities for you; outlining what’s needed and what compromises (if any) a given approach might bring.
No complicated words or financial terms; just robust strategy combined with clear advice.
HOW WE DO THINGS
What To Expect
A single point of contact and a personally tailored experience with your adviser.
You’ll deal with one of Jon-Paul, Pat or Simon who will work hard to understand you, address your financial resilience and begin to organise the figures.
We’ll discuss your experience of investing, your knowledge, determine how losses may come to impact you and work to understand how willing you are to take on risk. We’ll educate and inform you as much as we can about the consequences of the actions you could take.
We don’t have rigid beliefs when it comes to investing; there are a number of ways in which a problem can be managed and/or solved.
HOW WE DO THINGS
Our Process
01. Introduce
This may be by phone, virtual meeting or in-person.
(approximately 30 minutes)
We want to understand you in a little more detail, your aspirations and who else may be involved in the process.
This allows both you and us to understand how we might work together; there’s no pressure or obligation and we’ll happily address any questions you might have. We want you to be certain we’re the right choice for you.
If we’re not the right fit, we can refer you to other advisers we know who may be better suited.
02. Collaborate
2 weeks on from ‘Introduce’; time: 1-2 hours
A more focussed discussion with you. This is often in person (at a place to suit you) but we also use virtual meeting software if this is preferred or the telephone.
At this stage we’re identifying your strategic aims, short term plans and establishing some of the key risks that face you in the years ahead.
We ask questions, you talk and we listen. At this stage, we often uncover things you’re capable of achieving you previously thought impossible.
03. Review
This can take 1-4 weeks from ‘Collaborate’
We’ll help you upload personal and financial information to our secure portal.
This is a period of calm as we write to your existing investment providers and gather the facts about your existing assets. From here, we put together a summary as to how they support (or don’t) your strategy.
We may need to ask you some questions at this stage too just to make sure we’re clear on the detail; often, it is waiting for providers to correspond with us that takes time.
04. Strategy & Planning
3-6 weeks on from ‘Collaborate’; time: 1-2 hours
A face to face discussion where we build the strategy and agree plans together.
A good strategy relies on a clear diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent actions; the work we’ve done up to now allows us to craft what all this should mean for you.
By using mathematical modelling we can outline a range of scenarios and show how the numbers may work for you in a variety of situations. A snapshot ‘before and after’ highlights how our approach can materially benefit you in the years ahead.
05. Implement
– For financial products it’s a straightforward approach of making changes and/or opening the requisite accounts.
– For insurance we’ll help you through the underwriting process.
– For estate planning (including wills, lasting powers of attorney and so on) we’ll liaise with legal advisers where necessary.
If the strategy also involves your business we’ll work with your business advisors/accountants as required.
At the end of the implementation stage you can be confident of being well prepared for the future.
06. Ongoing
Life is dynamic. A strategy helps bring a future desired state closer to you but the outcomes cannot be predetermined.
With each passing year you’ll have different aims, your finances will have moved and/or legislation may be better/worse for you.
By evaluating and reassessing your ideal lifestyle we can keep you on track and maintain your confidence in your ability to enjoy life without fear of running out.
This involves an annual check across a number of key areas, to include (but not necessarily limited to) your personal aspirations, health, tax, income, capital, insurance, benevolent causes and financial modelling.
We’re always here when you need us.
HOW WE DO THINGS
Planning
A strategy represents an integrative set of choices that you have opted to make and underneath it, we work with our clients to agree appropriate plans.
In terms of financial planning – be it income, tax, investment or estate planning – there may be a range of financial products/solutions to be selected; some advisers are ‘restricted’ and are only able to use a limited range of products meaning what they advise may not be in your best interests.
At Cygnus, we’re independent and act in a fiduciary manner – recommendations we make are done so in line with your personal strategic aims; we’re not beholden to any one company or their range of products.
When it comes to investment in particular, we want to make sure you understand and are happy with what’s proposed; a strategy has a better chance of succeeding if you can tolerate the ups and downs.
To inform us, we’ll discuss your investment experience and knowledge; to inform you, we’ll establish how losses may impact you so that you understand the consequences of actions you (might) take.
At the recommendation stage we use a broad framework; we believe investments should be:
• Selected based on client need for them.
• Selected based on objective measures, not emotion or trend following.
• Proportionate in terms of costs/fees.
• Rebalanced periodically to keep risk levels appropriate.
As financial planners, we believe our role both initially and on an ongoing basis is to help make sure you don’t lose money unnecessarily; we try and achieve this by ensuring:
• Investment assets are held in appropriate wrappers (so you do not pay more tax than is necessary).
• Management is objectively assessed to measure what value is being added (relative to the cost).
• Withdrawals you are taking from a portfolio are not likely to lead to ruin.
• Our clients don’t panic or make poor investment decisions, relative to their financial aims.
Working with a financial planner can add value in a number of ways; Vanguard released a white paper in 2020* which found that working with a financial planner might add as much as 3% a year when taking into account a variety of objective and subjective financial planning factors.
Not all of these factors will be relevant to you but we will do all we can to help our clients enhance their prospective outcomes.
*Vanguard Research. (2020). Available here.