Financial planning
Financial planning
Financial planning is an ongoing process that helps you make sensible and informed decisions about money.
It goes beyond short-term fixes, such as purchasing one-off products like pensions or funds. Instead, it’s about thinking how best to spend your money to achieve your lifelong goals, both now and in the future.
Our team is committed to helping you make smart decisions about your finances, and helping you achieve all that is important to you.
Whilst flexible and adaptable, our approach to securing your financial future is broadly in keeping with a six-point planning process:
1. Gathering data
The initial “discovery process” is where we gain an understanding of your present financial position, your objectives and needs, tolerance to risk, and the types of investments or strategies that may be appropriate to meet your requirements.
2. Identifying your goals
An important part of the planning process is to clearly identify your financial goals and objectives.
Considerations may include:
- The income and asset levels you are aiming to achieve
- Future education expenses
- Upgrading or downsizing the family home
- Risk management, including protection of your income
- Accumulating assets to a defined level by a certain date
- Maintaining an agreed level of investment accessibility and flexibility
- Estate planning and transferring wealth to future generations.
3. Identifying your financial issues
We will then compare your financial situation with your goals to determine appropriate strategies necessary to achieve them.
This will form the foundations of your strategic plan.
4. Preparing your strategic plan
Having identified your goals and objectives and assessed your overall financial situation, we will then formulate an overall strategy.
Considering your tolerance to risk, we will then discuss with you our recommendations designed to achieve your desired goals.
The strategy we create for you will encompass multiple elements of financial planning to help you achieve your goals, including (where necessary):
Cashflow planning
Using cashflow planning software, we’ll be able to model various ‘what if’ scenarios to stress test your finances against your future goals.
Investment management
We’ll help you to invest in a way that’s disciplined, tax-efficient and best-placed for your financial and lifestyle needs.
Wealth accumulation
We’ll ensure you have effective strategies in place so that you can build your wealth to meet your current and future needs.
UK tax guidance
Thanks to our international presence and subsequent knowledge of the UK tax system, we’ll ensure you only pay as much tax as is necessary.
Estate planning
We’ll ensure you’re able to pass on wealth to your loved ones, both during and after your lifetime, whilst mitigating Inheritance Tax.
5. Implementing facets of your strategic plan
Once the strategic plan is discussed, then agreed and finalised, we will implement it on your behalf, or assist you with the process, overseeing parts of the implementation by other specialist professionals.
6. Reviewing your strategic plan
As you know, one thing is certain, and that is change. Whether it be changes in legislation, the economy (including interest rates and investment markets), your goals and objectives, or simply what is important about money to you, it is important to regularly review the performance of your strategic plan to ensure it continues to meet your objectives.
Part of our ongoing relationship would typically involve:
- Analysis of any changes in regulation/legislation, and investment and economic circumstances
- Reviewing your progress in achieving your financial goals, and revising strategies as required
- Monitoring, valuing and reviewing your investment portfolios
- Informing you of changing regulatory and planning opportunities
- Regular communication, including face-to-face meetings as required/preferred.
The fact that we could put in all the known cashflows and the known forecasted events that are coming in my life and then see how it all plans out was very useful and still is. The day we went through the cashflow, I remember going back to Anju and saying, ‘okay, we don’t have to worry now’. It was a weight off our shoulders.
Sateen and Anjali
Client since 2017
It helps to kind of think longer term; your whole life. It’s very easy to think not even a couple of years ahead, but when you’re planning over 80 years, or whatever it happens to be, it’s quite tricky to do so without the proper process in place.
Tony and Helen
Client since 2007
It’s good to see what our actions will mean later. The cashflow forecast is very visual, and we can understand the mechanics. It just helps me to understand things. That’s been one of the biggest things.
Scott and Ramona
Client since 2016
FAQs
We believe in the power of capital markets to deliver positive long-term returns that lead to wealth accumulation. For the equities market, in particular, we believe that public markets exhibit efficient characteristics over the long term. For the individual investor, it is thus not desirable to try to forecast or outguess other market participants.
We focus our efforts on building data-driven portfolios to get broad market exposure with a tilt towards characteristics that have been proven to capture premiums undervalued by the equities markets. We believe in creating diversified investment portfolios, which generate the highest possible expected return for every level of risk taken by an investor.
For Private Capital, this means continuously searching the investment universe for instruments that will improve risk-return tradeoff in our portfolios. We understand that fees dramatically affect long-term returns, and endeavor to continuously lower fees for our customers by leveraging our collective scale to create cost synergies. You can learn more about our investment philosophy here.
Financial markets have historically rewarded long-term investors, and provided growth of wealth that has more than offset inflation. Over time, markets display efficient characteristics and investors are rewarded commensurately for the risks that they take. Taking an evidence-based approach to investing means analyzing empirical data and academic evidence and applying it in a systematic manner rather than trying to speculate or outguess other market participants. The aim of evidence-based investing is to give you the highest probability of success in growing your wealth over the long-term.
Academic research has identified certain drivers of higher expected returns, and we structure our portfolios to capture these higher returns whilst maintaining a broad global market exposure. We believe in creating diversified investment portfolios, which generate the highest possible expected return for every level of risk taken by an investor. For Private Capital, this means continuously searching the investment universe for products that will improve risk-return tradeoff in our portfolios. We understand that costs dramatically affect long-term returns, and endeavor to implement efficient trading execution and continuously lower fees for our clients where possible.
Private Capital has done extensive due diligence and analysis to make asset allocation and portfolio construction decisions to select the best funds for our client portfolio. We utilise the expertise of some of the most respected fund management companies whose interests are aligned in serving you, and who share our values and investment philosophy. We offer investment products exhibiting consistent investment characteristics and offer these at attractive institutional-level costs. These fund managers manage the underlying funds in your portfolio.
We may at times choose to alter our portfolios at the discretion of our investment committee, to deploy other funds from other fund management companies if we feel it is the best way to express our asset allocation views, or if the additional funds improve the risk-return profile of the portfolio.