Have you built up a substantial portfolio over many years and confused by the thousands of investment options available to you? Are you finally looking to start investing with one eye on retirement.
Perhaps you have received a windfall or inheritance and are looking to protect the value against the effects of inflation.
The media can often make investing seem like a casino. At Heritage, taking an evidence based investment approach, we will look to invest your portfolio in a global, low cost diversified portfolio that is aligned to your risk appetite.
By owning the whole stock market, we do not try and pick winning fund managers or individual companies. By getting average stock markets returns, we believe you actually do better than the vast majority of fund managers who the evidence has shown fail to beat their benchmarks.
We have over 20 years’ experience in managing investments. We will invest your money as tax efficiently as possible, considering all of your ‘tax wrappers’ so that you can achieve your objectives.
At Heritage we do not simply invest your money and leave you to it.
We take the time to get to know you and understand your situation. We will try and understand exactly what it is you want to do with your money.
We will then review your existing investments. We will then agree a financial plan, which includes a recommendation on how we will invest your money to achieve your goals that we agreed earlier. We will gauge your attitude to risk and structure your investment portfolio accordingly.
Reviewing your portfolio on an ongoing basis, we will be with you every step of the way of your financial journey. As your circumstances no doubt change over time, we will be on hand to tweak your portfolio and financial plan over time.
If you would like to discuss your options with one of our independent investment advisers, please get in touch.
Our investment philosophy is backed up by rigorous, academic research. We believe financial markets are largely efficient. Trying to pick the next winning stock or fund, along with trying to time the market is impossible over the medium and long term.
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We believe in broad asset class investing, as asset allocation is the single biggest determinant of the returns of a portfolio.
| We will then look to invest in inexpensive index funds, aligned to your risk profile and diversified by asset class and geographies.
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We invest in a broad range of asset classes such as cash, fixed income (government and corporate bonds) property and equities (shares of companies). We typically invest in ‘collective investments’ or funds as this means you invest in hundreds and thousands of companies which adds diversification benefits to your portfolio.
We will agree the asset allocation or split between these various asset classes, as this will dictate the risk and return profile of your portfolio.
Historically the returns on deposit based accounts such as cash ISA’s and current accounts has been less than inflation.
This means your money is losing money in ‘real returns’. This is simply the return on cash based investment – inflation for a given year or period of time.
In order to achieve returns above inflation and at least protect the value against inflation, you should be prepared to invest in other asset classes.
This is a subjective question and we will assess your ‘attitude to investment risk’ based on various factors such as your previous investment experiences, your investment time horizon, capacity for loss/alternative assets and income and how you have felt during periods of market uncertainty.
We will also carry out a risk profiling questionnaire, all of which will give us an idea of the level of risk you would be comfortable with.
Whilst it is true that if you invest in assets other than cash you will expose your money to to investment risk and volatility – your money will go up and down.
However, we will invest your money is a variety of asset classes which should add some diversification benefits to your portfolio to try and dampen the volatility.
We would also recommend never investing your money if your time horizon is less than 5 years. This is because the longer your time horizon and your money is invested, the greater the chance your funds have to achieve a positive return and recover after periods of market stress such as the banking crisis in 2008 and the onset of COVID in early 2020.
This involves investing money each money on a regular, automatic basis. This should afford some protection against financial markets falling dramatically after your money is invested.
Should markets fall in value, this is actually beneficial to you as you can purchase your investments at a cheaper price which all things being equal should result in a higher expected return. If you are saving into a workplace pension, you will be doing this automatically.
We will also bear in mind the tax consequences when making a recommendation to invest your money.
This could simply be making a pension contribution for the tax relief, or it could mean investing in a stocks and shares ISA for to eventually generate a tax free source of income.
If your situation requires it, we can also consider tax advantaged investments such as Venture Capital Trusts (VCT’s) and Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS’s).
Heritage Financial Planning is a trading name of 2plan wealth management ltd which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It is entered on the FCA register (www.fca.org.uk) under reference 461598.
Registered office: 2plan wealth management Ltd, 3rd floor, Bridgewater place, Water Lane, Leeds, LS11 5BZ. Registered in England and Wales. Number: 05998270
