HOW IT WORKS
THE CLEARER WEALTH MANAGEMENT PROCESS
At Wilcocks & Wilcocks we pride ourselves on our unique CLEARER wealth management model, which has been proven to work for our clients
our 7 step wealth management model
Our CLEARER wealth management model, as featured in The Times, The Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, is an award-winning financial process built specifically with the busy entrepreneur in mind
The first step in our CLEARER model is working closely with investors to discuss their life goals and aspirations. It’s important to identify what matters most to our clients and to decipher what exactly it is they’re looking to achieve through financial planning. The next stage is working out what their number is. This figure will be the amount of money they will need in order to secure the lifestyle, retirement plan or financial security they’ve been discussing.
With a clear, prioritised set of goals in mind, and that all-important number, we can offer you our honest and realistic recommendations of how you can put plans in place to get to where you want to be. Going into depth, we will look at every option for you as an investor, from making the most of annual allowances and building in contingency plans to slashing excessive investment costs and taking steps to protect your legacy for your family. We can also help you to protect the future of your business with key insurance products and succession planning.
THE 10 POINT INVESTMENT PLAN
At Wilcocks & Wilcocks we are known for providing our clients with realistic and clear solutions, tailored especially to their financial situation and aspirations
We are investment advisers, not investment forecasters, speculators, or crystal ball readers. We don’t believe anybody else can successfully predict investment markets or returns continuously, nor will they ever be able to outperform equity markets on a consistent and repeatable basis.
Exposure to the entire developed world and emerging world equity markets, as opposed to fixed income markets – even during retirement years, is a must. Get this one thing right on its own, and we stand a chance of seeing the money outlive us. Get it wrong, and we will likely outlive the money.
Fixed income as an asset class used to work in the 70’s and 80’s when people tended to retire at 65 and live until 75. Nowadays, it’ll never get us through a three-decade retirement, and if relying on fixed income to get us through retirement, we will, in our opinion, outlive the money. Backing a fixed income retirement plan, in a rising cost world, is the ultimate financial suicide plan on instalments.
Small-cap equity and value-cap equity exposure, alongside main market large-cap equity exposure, again diversified throughout the entire developed and emerging world will continue to be essential and give us exposure to higher expected returns over time.
We trust the various equity markets we deploy to do their work, and all the evidence we have found points towards this combined strategy winning over pure ‘actively managed’ alternatives that are found to fail in over 80% of cases (supported by the University of London Business School), Vanguard, Dimensional Fund Advisors, and over 25000 academic papers to date.
The key elements within the above dynamics see that you will have exposure to all groups and classes of equities throughout both the developed and emerging world, giving you the broad asset, sector, and geographic diversification to capture returns from all markets that ebb and flow over time.
Keeping overall costs to circa 1.50% per annum such that the drag on investment growth is relatively low is also important, because, by way of an example, a 1% additional fee on £250K (whether it’s in a pension, an ISA, or a general investment account), will see the same £250K taken from the portfolio in fees over a 30-year retirement in that 1% alone when compounded.
Not selling out, and keeping calm when the markets tank, as they always have, and always will, every 7 years or so. Whilst everyone else’s behaviour is, or certainly shows form, for being erratic, you must stay calm because the falls have always been temporary and the advance permanent. Do not ‘throw the portfolio overboard’. Ever.
And in fact, instead of mass panic, you will be doubling up on any regular contributions or investing further lump sums of capital into our globally diversified equity model when the markets do tank, as much as possible, for further buy-in whilst ‘prices’ are low. And because you will be buying more when prices are low, you will even beat the fund managers we deploy at their own game.
In our opinion, that’s pretty much all it takes to make and then keep people wealthy. It’s then a case of managing behaviour, and safe income withdrawal to support retirement income needs as the years unfold, whilst managing inflation risk, keeping the faith in what we started.
