Robert & Christine were a married couple with three young children, Robert is a Doctor and Christine a Teacher. They approached us because they had accrued a considerable sum of money in a number of cash based savings accounts and wanted to explore the possibility of investing the capital to potentially receive better returns.

Robert and Christine

In our initial free meeting we discussed Robert and Christine’s investment goals and investment time scales. In addition, they both completed risk questionnaires so we could ascertain their attitudes to risk and capacity for loss and ensure the portfolios we designed were consistent with their attitudes toward risk. We also worked through a “fact find” so we had a thorough understanding of their financial circumstances.

Investment Strategy

We used the information gathered in the initial meeting to formulate an investment strategy which centred on the clients investing in a well-diversified multi-asset portfolio within separate Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) and a joint General Investment Account (GIA). A multi-asset portfolio is a diversified collection of different types of investments such as shares, bonds and property funds from different geographical locations, for example the UK, USA, Europe and Asia.

Our strategy was to use Robert and Christine’s annual ISA allowances and migrate capital from their joint GIA into their individual ISAs each tax year, until all of the capital is invested in their tax efficient ISAs.

Detailed Report

We presented our proposal to Robert and Christine in a detailed report. In the report we included information on the past performance of the investments we were recommending, the suitability and benefits of our proposed approach, information on the different types of tax wrappers we suggested and most importantly a detailed breakdown of all of the costs involved in implementing our proposals.

Robert and Christine chose to proceed with our advice and having set up their investments we now manage them on an ongoing basis. This means we watch over the performance of their investment funds and switch them when we believe it is necessary to do so. We also rebalance their portfolios in order to keep them in line with their attitudes to investment risk.