The 4 Cs - Convenience…

Can outsourcing your financial affairs really give you peace of mind?

Welcome to the next instalment of our mini series of articles that takes you through the four Cs – Competence, Convenience, Coaching and Continuity – that form the foundations of everything we do for our clients here at Engage.

This issue, we’re taking a closer look at ‘Convenience’. While we are first and foremost here to provide informed advice and help our clients to best use their funds to achieve their goals, if we can’t make it easy for them, then what’s the point? We have to make sure that everything we do is done in an efficient, stress free way that will ultimately save them time, freeing up both headspace and hours in the day to focus on the things that matter most.

When you’re in the throes of busy lives with kids, parents (who doesn’t feel the strain of being the sandwich generation?), work, mortgages, knowing someone just takes care of the finances is peace of mind. And it is down to us to make outsourcing financial matters truly worthwhile versus having them added onto that endless to do lists of responsibilities.

Convenience rules out a one size fits all approach.

Having convenience for our clients as a central pillar to how we run things as a business also means our focus has to be on providing a truly personalised service. No two people’s circumstances are exactly the same. Trying to shoe horn people’s financial advice and management into off the shelf options would mean compromise, frustration and inconvenience for our clients. Being able to create an approach that reflects the needs and wants of each individual client – both in terms of how they invest and how we work with them - is the only way to make everything as easy and effective as it possibly can be.

But beyond this, we also take a lot of the necessary grunt work out of investing. We will always coordinate with other professionals – solicitors, estate agents, bank managers etc – to make sure that everyone is aligned and singing from the same song sheet. This can sometimes feel a bit like herding cats, but when it works out, it can make all the difference.

Trust is what makes all this possible.

We of course monitor the investments too. Clients can feel confident, knowing that we are reviewing their portfolio and making sure that it is performing at its best. For example, if the balance of their portfolio starts to slip in favour of bonds or equities (this often happens when one or other is performing better), this can impact on the risk of the portfolio. Rebalancing means that the portfolio continues to reflect the risk level agreed upfront.

All these things allow our clients to switch off from the investment side of things and again focus on what’s important to them. The long standing, strong relationships we build with our clients means the trust is there for us to do this for them. That’s not to say clients can’t still take a very active role in their investments, we encourage that - which is where our next C ‘Coaching’ comes into play, our next article – but they can do it on their own terms and be involved as much or as little as they want.